New Delhi, June 13 -- Five thousand people have been sent across the border in barely three weeks. Hundreds more wait behind chain-link fencing in temporary detention centres that dot every district in West Bengal, sleeping on concrete floors while officials run nationality checks that rarely involve a courtroom.

West Bengal's new chief minister, Suvendu Adhikari, calls the campaign "detect, delete and deport." It's the clearest expression yet of what the Bharatiya Janata Party's first-ever government in the state intends to do with the hundreds of thousands of undocumented Bangladeshi migrants who've settled in the border belt over the past two decades. Since late May, when Adhikari's administration formalized the drive, 4,800 people ha...