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Murshidabad (West Bengal): On the night of December 20, Juel Rana, a 20-year-old migrant worker from Chakbahadurpur village in West Bengal’s Murshidabad, stopped answering his phone in Sambalpur, Odisha. His family knew something had gone terribly wrong.

Juel Rana had left Chakbahadurpur village district to work as a mason, another young man pushed out by shrinking rural wages and the collapse of steady local employment. He did not return alive.

According to his family, a group of men confronted him, demanded to know why a “Bangladeshi” had come there, and assaulted him with iron rods and sharp weapons, striking his head until he collapsed. 

His sister Tumpa Khatun recalled the night to The Wire, “A group with covered faces and saffron headbands came at night and asked, ‘Why has a Bangladeshi come here?’ They beat him to death. He was just 20… What is our fault? Should we not go outside Bengal?”

Juel Rana. Photo: Joydeep Sarkar.

An FIR was subsequently registered under Sections 103(2), 108(2), and 109(3)(5) of the Bharatiya Nyay Sanhita (BNS), and six people were arrested. Juel’s body was brought back to Chakbahadurpur village, plunging the area into grief and fury. He is survived by his father and two sisters, one younger than him. His father, Jiaul Haque, a mason working in Kerala, returned home to bury his son.

Haque summed up the impossible choice facing thousands of families in Murshidabad, “Here wages are Rs 250, there Rs 500. But you only get work maybe two days a week on average. There’s been no government work for nearly ten years. What should we do? We go knowing we may die. We can’t change our name, identity, or language.”

Rana’s killing is being read far beyond Chakbahadurpur as a crime with a political vocabulary – the words “Bangladeshi” or “Rohingya” being used not as a legal category, but as an accusation that strips poor Bengali-speaking workers of legitimacy and safety.

In that sense, his death is not being treated as an isolated case. For migrant workers from West Bengal, it has become a symbol of a widening crisis, where economic survival increasingly comes at the cost of physical safety, dignity and even citizenship.

Just weeks before Rana’s death, Ruhul Islam, a hawker from Sagarpara, was attacked in Odisha’s Ganjam district by a mob chanting “Jai Shri Ram.” This followed a pattern of escalating hostility. Months earlier, thousands of workers from Malda and Murshidabad fled Odisha after being targeted solely for being “Bengali.” Many, like Sujon Sarkar, who was stripped and beaten, eventually left the state again in pursuit of a better livelihood.

Juel Rana’s two sisters. Photo: Joydeep Sarkar.

In 2025, the implementation of a Union home ministry circular regarding the verification of “suspected Bangladeshis” fundamentally altered the legal and social landscape........

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