The Punjab and Haryana High Court on Wednesday asked the Haryana government whether it had a standard operating procedure to verify the identity of migrant workers it was detaining, The Indian Express reported.

Several Bengali-speaking persons from West Bengal and Assam were detained in Gurugram in July on suspicion of being undocumented Bangladeshi migrants. They were released after their documents were verified.

The bench was hearing a petition alleging that several Indian citizens had been wrongfully detained in Gurugram and held in inhumane conditions.

The public interest litigation asked the court to direct the state government to frame a uniform procedure to be followed while identifying undocumented migrants.

The petitioner said that the police in Gurugram had rounded up persons from minority groups, accusing them of being undocumented migrants, despite them having documents such as an Aadhaar card, a voter ID and ration cards to prove their identity as Indians.

“They were detained in community centres, sometimes in groups of two to three hundred, with no access to family members or lawyers,” the petitioner was quoted as saying.

They were not released for days, even after the police and administration in West Bengal had certified that the persons who had been detained are Indian citizens, the newspaper quoted the petitioner as having claimed.

The plea said that Haryana and neighbouring Punjab either do not have a verification procedure or it was being “flagrantly violated”, The Indian Express reported.

In May, the Union home ministry directed states and Union Territories to verify the credentials of persons suspected to be undocumented migrants from Bangladesh and Myanmar.

However, the petitioner said that the procedure referred to in the Union home ministry’s instructions could not be found on its website.

The counsel for the Haryana government defended the detentions, saying the police were acting in line with the directions of the Union government.

The court directed the Haryana government to either produce a copy of the procedure being followed or file an affidavit stating that no such guidelines were available.

Since the Pahalgam terror attack, Bengali-speaking migrant workers have been rounded up by the police in several states ruled by the Bharatiya Janata Party and asked to prove that they are Indian citizens. In some cases, Indian workers were sent to Bangladesh.