“We are as Indian as the people living in those big societies,” said Abida Bibi, 22, as she stood in a queue with a bundle of documents outside the duty officer’s room in Noida’s Sector 49 police station on Thursday afternoon. “But never in our lives did we imagine that we would have to prove it one day.”
The documents Abida Bibi held firmly in her hands were several photocopies of her and her husband’s Aadhaar cards, voter identity cards and even a document issued by the gram panchayat, or village council, of their village in West Bengal’s Cooch Behar district. They were required to establish their identities as Indian nationals.
A day after a mob mostly comprising domestic workers and their family members vandalised the entrance to Mahagun Moderne Society in Noida’s Sector 78 after a domestic worker employed there did not return home the previous night, the mood among domestic workers in the area, some of whom were part of the mob, had changed from anger to fear.
The missing woman, Zohra Bibi emerged from the complex on Wednesday morning even as the police was called to control the mob that had come looking for her. She alleged that she had been assaulted and…
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