Indian Man Stripped, Assaulted In Ireland, Sparks Racism Row
The Gardai had been alerted regarding the incident at Parkhill Road, Tallaght at approximately 6pm.
Ambassador of India to Ireland, Akhilesh Mishra, questioned and condemned the incident on X saying, "How can an "ALLEGED" assault cause such horrible injury & bleeding?" He thanked the Irish people and the gardai for their sympathy and support to the victim and called for the perpetrator to be brought to justice.
According to the Irish Independent, Fine Gael councillor, Baby Pereppadan for Tallaght South met the victim and said that he's in "shock", and said, "He couldn't speak much because of the shock he was in, he only arrived in Ireland three weeks ago. He is not taking any visitors at the moment."
He noted that such incidents are happening frequently in Tallaght and called for more Garda presence in the area.
He also said, "People need to understand that many Indian people moving to Ireland are here on work permits, to study and work in the healthcare sector or in IT and so on, providing critical skills."
Sinn Fein TD for Dublin South-West, Seán Crowe, termed the attack as "violent and racist" and said that it was "vile and utterly unacceptable on so many levels".
"Anyone who thinks this sort of mindless, racist violence makes their community safer is lying and fooling no one. Some residents are increasingly nervous to leave their homes due to this type of behaviour, regardless of whether they are new arrivals to our community or have lived here all their lives.
The Irish Times has reported that the assault is being investigated as a possible hate crime. Allegedly, the man had been falsely accused by the group of acting inappropriately around children, however the Garda said there is no truth to these accusations.
Paul Murphy, a People Before Profit TD for the area criticised the attack and said, "Responsibility lies not just with those who perpetrated the violence but also with those who have been spreading racist lies. The community is really shocked and outraged and will stand together against violence, hate and division."
Minister for Justice Jim O'Callaghan said this week he was aware that foreign nationals are being falsely accused of crimes.
"Increasingly, you hear of people blaming immigrants for crimes. All I can say to you is: I have asked for the statistics and when you look at the prison population of people convicted of offences, the percentage of immigrants in prison is lower than the percentage of immigrants in society," he said.
"So there's no substance to the suggestion that immigrants are more likely to commit a criminal offence", he added.
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The Hindu
41 minutes ago
- The Hindu
Bengali migrant workers and Indian citizenship: In the name of a nation
Nazimuddin Mondal (34) recalls that he was slapped before being asked to sing the national anthem. 'At the police station they told me to sing it and then checked my phone to see if there were any phone numbers from Bangladesh,' he says. Mr. Mondal says life had been going smoothly for about a year and a half in Mumbai's Nalasopara area, where he lived on rent. With a daily wage of ₹1,300, the migrant from Tartipur village in Murshidabad district, West Bengal, had come to Maharashtra to work. On June 9, 2025, there was a knock on his door. Men in uniform had come for him. They took him to the local police station. Mr. Mondal recalls that there were 13 Bengali-speaking men at the police station. Then began a journey of about 2,500 kilometres spanning six days. From the police station in Mumbai, Mr. Mondal says he and a few others were taken for a medical check-up, then driven to Pune the next morning. He recalls that they were put on a flight from Pune to West Bengal, their hands in zip-ties. After landing somewhere in north Bengal, Mr. Mondal says he was driven along the international border in the early hours of one morning and pushed into Bangladesh. 'The men in plainclothes forced me to cross the border. It was the scariest day of my life,' he says. He was handed ₹300 in Bangladeshi currency, a packet of food, and a bottle of water. ''You all are Bangladeshis,' the man told me in Bengali, threatening to shoot me if I tried to return.' On June 14, 2025, a video of him and two others, Minarul Sheikh and Mostafa Kamal Sheikh, both also migrant workers from West Bengal, allegedly picked up by the police in Maharashtra, surfaced on social media. Sitting in an open field, the men cried out to the West Bengal Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee for help: 'Mamata (Banerjee) Didi please save us... We have been pushed into Bangladesh.' The next day, the three were repatriated through the India-Bangladesh border close to Mekhliganj town of Cooch Behar district, West Bengal. Across India, thousands of Bengali-speaking migrants are being asked for documentation to prove their Indian citizenship. The crackdown began, say sources in the Home Ministry, after the regime change in Bangladesh in August 2024. The questioning intensified after the Pahalgam attack on April 22, 2025. Ms. Banerjee alleges that the intensity of it is felt most in the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP)-ruled States. The Delhi Police has checked documents of over 16,000 Bengali-speakers over the past few months. The Haryana government had set up detention centres in July where they allegedly held people. In Gujarat, over 1,000 were detained in Ahmedabad and Surat. Through June and July, migrant workers have been leaving jobs in other States to return to West Bengal. Almost a month after the incident, Mr. Mondal is back home. He wears the same shirt in which he was seen in the video, and is struggling to find work in his village. 'The contractor (in Mumbai) is calling me regularly, but I have no documents; they were all taken by the police. Here, even if I get work, I don't get even ₹500 a day,' the migrant worker says. The village, located along one of the distributaries of the Ganga, has a standing crop of jute in July, rising to almost five feet. The roads are filled with potholes so deep that ducks swim in them. Most men in the village migrate out of West Bengal for work, though there is no reliable data on how many do. Going back to work Less than a kilometre from his house, is a locality where other migrant workers have been forced to return from their place of work. They were detained for three days in the neighbouring state of Odisha. They were part of a group of about 400 who were detained by the Jharsuguda police in Odisha during the second week of July. On July 9, 2025, the Trinamool Congress (TMC), the ruling party in West Bengal, posted a 55-second video of the workers on social media. In the video, Samiul Ansari (31) is describing how they were picked up in the dead of night. At their village in Murshidabad, Mr. Samiul Ansari is joined by four others: Yeasmin Ali Ansari (50), Manaruzzaman Ansari (41), Newton Ansari (33), and Amanat Ansari (31). They sit in a circle and narrate their ordeal during detention for 72 hours. By Indian law, police can detain a person for no longer than 24 hours, before which they must be produced before a magistrate. 'The police did not beat us at the detention centre, but kept saying that they had orders from above to detain us,' Mr. Samiul Ansari says. The men, who were detained in Jagatsinghpur district in Odisha, say they have been going to the State for a decade to work; this was the first time they had faced trouble. Odisha's government is run by the BJP that came to power last year. 'There is no work here. Maybe we won't go to where the police had detained us,' they say. The three younger men in the group went back to Odisha 11 days later. Their greatest fear is what identity documents they should carry so that the police does not detain them. In the village, Razzak Sheikh, the father of two migrant workers, has filed a habeas corpus petition before the Calcutta High Court, when his sons were detained elsewhere in Odisha. 'I got a call from the police there, who threatened to push my sons into Bangladesh if we failed to produce birth certificates.' Having an Indian birth certificate is, however, no guarantee say migrant workers, that they will not be harassed. Amir Sheikh, 19, from Malda's Kaliachak area, who was allegedly jailed in Rajasthan for a week before being pushed into Bangladesh in May 2025, had one, say his parents. Up to 1,000 people were identified as suspected Bangladeshi nationals, detained, and sent to six detention centres, in the State. The parents have produced their passports too, but say their son is still stuck in Bangladesh. On August 7, 2025, the father filed a habeas corpus before the Calcutta High Court. On July 30, 2025, the Maharashtra government claimed that 42,000 'fake' birth certificates issued to 'Bangladeshis' had been cancelled, and the number to be further cancelled by August 15 would be far higher. Politics at play In the first week of May 2025, weeks before these stories of migrants alleging detention and pushing into Bangladesh surfaced, TMC Rajya Sabha MP Samirul Islam wrote a letter to Mr. Shah. In it he claimed there was a 'disturbing pattern of targeted hostility' against Bengali workers in BJP-ruled States such as Gujarat. Mr. Islam is the chairperson of West Bengal Migrant Welfare Board. By the second week of July, reports of migrant workers in different parts of India began surfacing almost daily in West Bengal. On July 16, 2025, Ms. Banerjee hit the streets in Kolkata and warned that protests would rage across the country if Bengali migrants continue to be harassed. Two days later, Prime Minister Narendra Modi, while speaking at a public meeting in Durgapur in the southern part of West Bengal and one of India's main steel-producing centres, said that 'Bengali asmita' (identity and culture) was paramount to the BJP, but emphasised that 'whoever has infiltrated into the country will be dealt with as per law'. On July 21, 2025, Ms. Banerjee addressed her party's annual Martyrs' Day rally. This is a commemoration of the day 13 people were killed in 1993, when police fired on the Youth Congress, then led by Ms. Banerjee. Before lakhs of supporters in Kolkata she claimed that the BJP government at the Centre 'was unleashing terror on the Bengali language' and announced that a 'language movement' would continue until the Assembly polls, due in 2026. From the stage of the mega Trinamool event, the party chairperson read excerpts from what she called a secret notification issued by the Union Government in May 2025, and sent only to BJP-ruled States, which stated that if someone was suspected of being Bangladeshi, they should be detained for a month and sent to detention or holding camps. Amidst thousands of migrants returning and the disruption of work, the debate on Bengali language and identity continues to rage. On August 3, 2025, the Delhi Police issued a letter referring to the Bengali language as Bangladeshi, which the Trinamool took up as an insult to the 'Bengali-speaking people of India'. The very next day, while justifying the action of Delhi Police, BJP IT cell chief Amit Malviya said, 'There is, in fact, no language called Bengali.' The West Bengal BJP leadership said that the drive is to identify Bangladeshi infiltrators and not migrants of the State. Leader of Opposition Suvendu Adhikari and newly appointed State BJP president Samik Bhattacharya speak of 'sanitising the voter list and removing lakhs of Bangladeshi voters'. They insist on a Special Intensive Revision (SIR) of the voter list on the lines of what is happening in Bihar. Economically speaking The flight of industries and unemployment remain major challenges in West Bengal. The National Statistical Office's (NSO) Annual Survey on Unincorporated Sector Enterprises (ASUSE) made public in 2024 pointed out that West Bengal lost 3 million jobs in unincorporated enterprises from 2015-16 to 2022-23. In 2024, the Union Finance Minister had said that the share of industrial production in West Bengal had declined from 24% at the time of independence to 3.5% in 2021. Economist Abhirup Sarkar, the chairperson of the West Bengal Infrastructure Development Finance Corporation, says, 'There are historical reasons behind the decline of industries in West Bengal. One of the biggest factors is that Kolkata was dominated by British companies, which left after independence. Then, during the Left regime, militant trade unions and strikes played a role in the flight of capital.' He adds that productivity is low in West Bengal, but there is also a perception battle about the State. More than a shared border West Bengal shares a 2,216-km border with Bangladesh, and about 450 km of the border remains unfenced, making it porous in parts. Union Home Minister Amit Shah has said this is largely because the West Bengal government is not providing land to do so. However, there are cultural, historical, and geographic ties between the Bengalis on both sides of the border. The partition of Bengal took place on Rakshabandhan day in 1905, when the then Viceroy of India, Lord Curzon, divided the Bengal Presidency into west (predominantly Hindu, including Bihar and Orissa) and east (predominantly Muslim, including Assam). This was annulled in 1911, when the capital was moved to Delhi. However, there was further turmoil in 1947, when East Pakistan was formed, and people moved across the newly-formed border, on the basis of religion. In 1971, when Bangladesh was formed, another wave of people came to India. Ten years ago, in 2015, a Land Border Agreement was signed between the two countries, where land parcels were exchanged, because there was Indian territory deep within Bangladesh and vice versa. People in these parcels were given the choice to become Bangladeshi nationals or Indian citizens. Shamshul Haque and Rabiul Haque chose India, and migrated to Gurugram, in Haryana, to work. They were arrested on suspicion of being Bangladeshi nationals. 'We chose to come to India leaving our place of birth behind because we always thought of ourselves as Indians. I had never thought, even in my dreams, that I would be held on suspicion of being Bangladeshi,' Shamshul says, showing a citizenship certificate issued by West Bengal's Cooch Behar district administration. While the majority of migrant workers detained or pushed into Bangladesh are Muslims, there are some from the Matua community, a sect of Hindu Namashudras, Dalits who migrated from Bangladesh, who are also facing detention. In Nadia district, two migrant workers from a Matua family, who had openly announced their allegiance to the BJP, were arrested by the Maharashtra police several months ago. Manishankar Biswas (23) and Nirmal Biswas (22) had left their home to work as carpenters in Akola district.Their father, Nishikanta, is an agricultural labourer. He and his wife, Pushpa, do not have the money to travel to Maharashtra. They live in a house put together with tin sheets. 'We have had several cases of people of the Matua community being held by the police in Maharashtra. When the police pick up people on the basis of language, both Hindus and Muslims will be arrested,' says Nikhilesh Adhikari, a Nagpur-based lawyer who is trying to arrange bail for the two men. On June 28, 2025, Ms. Banerjee urged migrant workers to return to West Bengal and assured them of work. Just a little over a month on, there are serpentine queues of migrant labourers at Howrah Station, booking tickets to leave again. Rakesh Alam, 27, is boarding the Howrah Ahmedabad Superfast Express, leaving his four-month-old daughter behind. He says, 'I cannot stay in Bengal when I have a family to feed.' shivsahay.s@ Edited by Sunalini Mathew
The Hindu
an hour ago
- The Hindu
Irish Foreign Minister to meet Indian community members amid attacks
Irish Foreign Minister Simon Harris will meet representatives of the Indian community in Ireland on Monday (August 11, 2025) to assure them of safety and security, the Embassy of Ireland said on Friday (August 8, 2025), as attacks against Indian community members soared in recent weeks. In a statement, the Embassy here expressed 'shock' about the indiscriminate attacks against the members of the Indian community. 'I want to be so clear — the Indian community in Ireland have made and do make an excellent contribution to Irish society. They are welcome. They are appreciated. Next week, I look forward to meeting the Ireland India Council. Ireland will never ever tolerate racism. Thank you to members of the Indian community in our country for their contributions to our country in so many ways,' said Mr. Harris in a social media post on Friday. The violent incidents against Indians have been increasing in recent weeks with the latest victims being a six-year-old child and a hotel chef. The Embassy of India in Dublin has been meeting Irish officials over the past month when the attacks suddenly increased. 'The Embassy of Ireland in New Delhi is deeply shockedand saddened by the recent violent attacks against Indian citizens in Ireland. We condemn these attacks in the strongest possible terms. They are an assault on the values of equality and human dignitythat Ireland holds dear,' said the Embassy in the statement. 'Racism and xenophobia have no place in Irish society. The actions of the few do not reflect the spirit of the Irish people.' Indian authorities have been highlighting the need for quick police action against the perpetrators. On August 1, the Indian Embassy in Dublin issued an advisory urging nationals to take 'reasonable precautions'.
NDTV
2 hours ago
- NDTV
Probe Agency Opposes Sanjay Bhandari's Plea Against 'Fugitive Offender' Tag In Delhi High Court
New Delhi: The Enforcement Directorate on Friday opposed in the Delhi High Court a plea of UK-based arms consultant Sanjay Bhandari against a trial court's order declaring him a "fugitive economic offender". The probe agency said when the trial court's order was passed in July, the court was aware about an assessment order showing Rs 655 crore of property was surreptitiously acquired. His counsel and senior advocate Kapil Sibal, however, argued before Justice Neena Bansal Krishna that the prosecution was initiated without completion of assessment proceedings and if the assessment was incomplete, where was the reason to believe that the tax evasion was over Rs 100 crore. "They had no evidence to show that there was a Rs 100 crore tax liability. There has to be reason to believe that the tax liability is more than Rs 100 crore. Now if the assessment is not completed, where is the reason to believe that it is more than Rs 100 crore. This application (to declare him a fugitive) did not lie. It was premature," he submitted. Seeking a stay and quashing of the trial court proceedings, Sibal said Bhandari would be remediless the moment they declare him a fugitive. "They (ED) don't follow the law, they want to declare me a fugitive offender and take over Rs 400-500 crores of my property and don't allow me to file any claim. This is the state of law in this country," he said. Additional Solicitor General S V Raju, appearing for the ED, said, "When the order was passed the trial court was aware that there was an assessment order showing that Rs 655 crore of property has been surreptitiously acquired and on the date of the order, there was more than Rs 100 crore tax liability and Rs 196 crore of tax evasion is there." The court posted the matter for August 20. The trial court on July 5 declared Bhandari a "fugitive economic offender" on a plea by the ED, an order that allows the agency to confiscate all the assets worth crores of rupees of Bhandari, whose chances to come to India have been virtually nullified after a UK court recently ruled against his extradition. Bhandari's legal team, while opposing the ED's move to get him declared a fugitive offender, claimed its "client's stay could not be called illegal in the UK as he has a legal right to reside in the UK and the government of India is bound by the judgment of the UK court... Bhandari is legally living there, and declaring him a 'fugitive' in that scenario is legally wrong". The trial court said the "extradition attempt may have failed, but it will not make the accused an angel or immune from prosecution for the violation of Indian laws". Bhandari (63) fled to London in 2016, soon after the I-T department raided him in Delhi. The ED filed its first chargesheet against Bhandari in 2020. The agency is probing Bhandari's links with Robert Vadra, the businessman husband of Congress MP Priyanka Gandhi Vadra. PTI SKV SKV AMK AMK
