A court in Bangladesh has declared two families from West Bengal’s Birbhum district, who had been forced into the neighbouring country earlier this year from India, as Indian citizens, The Indian Express reported on Friday.

An order issued by the senior judicial magistrate of the Sadar Court in Chapainawabganj on October 3 directed that the matter be forwarded to the Indian High Commission in Dhaka for appropriate action.

The magistrate took into account the families’ Aadhaar cards and residential addresses in West Bengal, the newspaper reported. The court also noted that the group included a pregnant woman, Sonali Khatun, and children.

“We are hoping that they will come back in the next one or two days,” Supratick Syamal, Khatun’s lawyer in India, told Scroll on Friday.

Since May, thousands of Bengali-speaking migrant workers have been rounded up in states ruled by the Bharatiya Janata Party and asked to prove that they were Indian citizens – and not undocumented immigrants.

In several cases, workers have been declared foreigners within days and forced into Bangladesh, despite being Indian citizens.

Khatun’s relatives had said that she, her husband Danish Sheikh and their eight-year-old child were among six persons detained from Delhi in June and allegedly forced across the border.

Her father, Bhodu Sheikh, had filed a petition before the Calcutta High Court, citing concerns about the citizenship of her unborn child.

The other family that was deported was Sweety Bibi, 32, and her two sons, aged six and 16, also from Birbhum.

Both the migrant worker families had been held at the KN Katju Marg police station in Delhi before being deported as “Bangladeshi citizens”.

The order issued on October 3 came days after the High Court on September 26 set aside the Centre’s deportation order against the two families. The bench said that “acting in hot haste to deport them” was a clear violation of the law that needed to be set aside

The court directed that the six persons, including Khatun, be brought back to West Bengal within four weeks. It also rejected the Centre’s request for a stay.

It had earlier asked the Centre to file an affidavit explaining the process of deportation and disclose the place from where the families were pushed across the border. In its affidavit, the Centre had alleged that the detainees are Bangladeshi nationals.

On Friday, Trinamool Congress MP Samirul Islam welcomed the order issued by the Bangladesh court.

“The very people whom our own country tried so hard to brand as Bangladeshi have now been proven to be Indians – not by us, but by Bangladesh,” the Rajya Sabha MP said on social media. “In a landmark verdict, a Bangladeshi court has not only declared them Indian citizens but even cited their Aadhaar card numbers and residential addresses as proof.”

Islam added that the order had been sent to the Indian High Commission in Dhaka, directing that all of them, including Khatun, be safely sent back to India.

“This exposes yet again how the anti-Bengal BJP cruelly targets poor Bengali-speaking people, labelling them as Bangladeshis and deporting them for no other reason than their language,” the Trinamool Congress leader said.

Islam further noted that the High Court had already directed that Khatun and the others be brought back within four weeks. “Now, the question remains – when will the anti-Bengal Central Government finally bring Sonali and her companions home?” he added.

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