Earlier this week, a Jharkhand native working as a migrant labour in Mangaluru, Karnataka was assaulted by four men after being accused of being a Bangladeshi national. Diljan Ansari has been working in the city for more than 15 years. Three persons have been arrested in connection with the attack, reported The Hindu. The police lodged a case under Section of 126(2) (wrongful restraint), 109 (causing hurt to a person), 352 (intentional insult with intent to provoke breach of peace), 351(3) (criminal intimidation), 353 (circulation of false information), 118(1) r/w 3(5) of (voluntarily causes hurt by means of any instrument for shooting, stabbing or cutting) of the Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita (BNS).
But the attack on Ansari is only the latest in a flurry of incidents that have taken place in states like Kerala (where RamnarayanBaghel was lynched by a mob in December 2025) and Odisha, where Juel Sheikh, a daily wage labourer was beaten to death at a tea stall by a mob. Both men were accused of being Bangladeshi at the time of the attack. Baghel’s case drew widespread condemnation. The post-mortem confirmed that he sustained over 80 injuries across his body, including fatal head wounds, with doctors stating there was “no part of the body without injuries” and concluding that he died from blood loss caused by the attack.
Similar incidents have also taken place where the victim has been accused of being “Chinese”, as in the case of Anjel Chakma, a 22-year old from Tripura who was stabbed in Dehradun on Dec. 28, 2025. On Dec. 28, R. Suraj, a migrant from West Bengal, who was working in Tamil Nadu’s Karumbukadai in Coimbatore, was murdered by an autorickshaw driver and another local over an argument. Similar to Juel’s case in Odisha, often these incidents are said to break out over minor disagreements or arguments. But they reveal a much more deep-seated anxiety of citizenship and identity.
This pattern of violence also cannot be seen in isolation from India’s broader geopolitical posturing in the region, where anxieties around borders, migration, and national security have increasingly been articulated through racialised and communal frames. The repeated invocation of the “Bangladeshi infiltrator” – whether in political speeches, media narratives, or policy actions such as the pushback of Bangladeshi migrants (including Rohingya refugees) into Myanmar – has helped normalise suspicion towards poor, racialised, and Muslim bodies. This trickles down into social media posts and WhatsApp forwards that encourages people to treat others with suspicion and exact violence upon them.
News channels also fan the flames and do not ask the obvious follow-up question needed: what if they were indeed Bangladeshi? Does rule of law allow for mob violence against anyone, including those who may not be citizens of the country? Instead, media reports often display a troubling moral evasion, hastily reassuring viewers that the suspicion was “false” – that the victim was not Bangladeshi – much in the same way lynchings are retrospectively sanitised by clarifying that the meat was “not beef but mutton.” This framing shifts the outrage away from the act of violence itself and onto the supposed error in identification, as if the brutality would have been somehow less reprehensible had the victim actually been Bangladeshi. In doing so, the media normalises the idea that certain identities are legitimate targets of mob justice. What makes these attacks particularly dangerous is how easily suspicion turns into violence. Migrant workers, daily wage labourers, and people from the Northeast or border regions become especially vulnerable, targeted not for any crime but for how they look, speak, or live.