Kolkata, Aug. 29 -- West Bengal Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee today expressed satisfaction after the Supreme Court questioned the detention of Bengali-speaking migrant workers and their deportation to Bangladesh, noting that linguistic identity alone cannot be treated as proof of foreign origin.
A bench of Justices Surya Kant, Joymalya Bagchi and Vipul M. Pancholi, while hearing a plea filed by the West Bengal Migrant Workers Welfare Board, pressed the union government to clarify whether speaking Bengali was being used as prima facie evidence of being a foreign national.
The petition alleged that several workers from Bengal had been arbitrarily detained and even deported without proper verification of their citizenship status. In one ins...