Why are BJP leaders talking about partitioning Bengal?

Over the past week, Bharatiya Janata Party leaders have suggested a trifurcation of West Bengal. Incorporate North Bengal into India’s North East region. Carve out Greater Cooch Behar as a separate state. Merge Malda and Murshidabad districts with parts of Bihar and Jharkhand to form a separate Union territory.

Why are BJP leaders suddenly talking about restructuring West Bengal? After the party won only 12 of the 42 seats it contested in the state in the 2024 Lok Sabha elections and with Assembly elections not due for another couple of years, the Hindutva party is trying to consolidate its presence in North Bengal, where it has a stronger presence than the rest of the state, experts say.

However, these demands put the Hindutva party in dangerous territory, awakening traumatic memories of previous partitions of Bengal – in 1905 and 1947.

In addition, these demands have caused some confusion within the BJP. While some leaders are floating demands to reconfigure the state in various ways, others have expressed their opposition to these suggestions.

As the BJP struggles to establish its relevance in West Bengal, observers say, these plans are among the several balloons the party is floating in the hope that one of them will fly.

What demands have been made?

The most prominent BJP voice in West Bengal to have made a demand about the reconfiguration is state unit President Sukanta Majumdar. In a video message on July 24, Majumdar said that he had made a proposal to Prime Minister Narendra Modi to incorporate North Bengal into India's northeastern region because the two areas shared “many similarities”.

“It is up to the prime minister now to decide on this,” he said. “But if North Bengal is incorporated with North East India, the region will benefit from Central government schemes.” Majumdar’s statement has some significance because he is the Union minister of state for education and development of the North East region.

Majumdar later clarified that he did not want West Bengal to be divided, though he did not elaborate on what kind of arrangement he had in mind. But after his comments, there were renewed demands for Gorkhaland and Greater Cooch Behar to be carved out of West Bengal as separate states.

Just a day after Majumdar made the proposal, a BJP Rajya Sabha MP Nagen Roy, who is also known as Ananta Maharaj, reiterated the demand for Greater Cooch Behar. Roy is a leader of the Rajbongshi ethnic group, which has for decades been demanding a separate state comprising parts of four districts of North Bengal and some neighbouring regions of Lower Assam.

Roy told reporters that the Greater Cooch Behar statehood demand should be met before the government takes any action on Majumdar’s proposal to incorporate North Bengal into the North East. Roy claimed that the prime minister’s office had already instructed the Union home ministry to create the state he has been pushing for.

On the same day Roy made the comments, came another demand from Nishikant Dubey, the BJP MP from Godda in Jharkhand. In a speech in Parliament, Dubey suggested merging West Bengal’s Malda and Murshidabad districts, Bihar’s Araria, Kishanganj and Katihar districts and Jharkhand’s Santhal Parganas region to form a Union Territory.

The number of “illegal immigrants from Bangladesh” in the region was rising, he claimed, and this new entity would help contain this as the Union Territory would be governed by the Centre.

Why is the BJP raising these demands?

The demand for Muslim-dominated Malda and Murshidabad to be hived off as part of a Union Territory is driven by the BJP’s attempt to stoke communal anxieties so it can make a case for intervention from the Centre, said journalist and author Snigdhendu Bhattacharya.

By taking these two districts out of Bengal, the BJP hopes to dent the electoral prospects of the Trinamool Congress, which enjoys considerable support among Muslims, Bhattacharya said.

The two other proposals – to link North Bengal with the North East and to create a separate Greater Cooch Behar state – rest on the claim that regions that share a cultural identity should be consolidated. They also aim to fan the perception that Kolkata has neglected development activities in these areas.

All these proposals to reconfigure the state are designed to decouple the rest of the state from South Bengal, where the Trinamool Congress has a much stronger support base, experts said.

Statehood demands in North Bengal are not new. For decades, Nepali speakers have pressed for a state called Gorkhaland for Nepali speakers, while the Rajbongshi ethnic group wants a Greater Cooch Behar state. Other Rajbongshis are pressing for Kamtapur state, which would include Bengal’s Cooch Behar, Darjeeling, Alipurduar, Uttar Dinajpur, Dakshin Dinajpur and Malda districts, as well as parts of Assam’s Goalpara, Dhubri, Kokrajhar and Bongaigaon.

The proposed boundaries of Kamtapur and Greater Cooch Behar are roughly similar, though the Greater Cooch Behar demand does not include Malda.

Since 2014, when the BJP’s footprint in Bengal started expanding, the party has backed these movements. After the 2021 state elections too, some BJP leaders had demanded a Union Territory in North Bengal. But at times, the BJP has had to backtrack on its promises. For instance, the fear of alienating its core voters prompted the BJP to do a U-turn on Gorkhaland even though its 2014 Lok Sabha elections manifesto said it would “sympathetically examine and appropriately consider the long-pending demands of the Gorkhas” if it came to power.

“In a way, the BJP is looking to trifurcate the state because the politics of cultural identity will only work from Darjeeling to Dinajpur in the north, not in Malda and Murshidabad in Central Bengal,” Bhattacharya said.

Political columnist Adil Hossain said that the BJP has realised that “it will not be able to wrest South Bengal from Trinamool, so it wants to leverage its support base in the north to create a separate state or Union Territory”.

The BJP’s renewed focus on North Bengal is not just playing to its strengths, but also an attempt to ensure that it does not lose its footing in the region, said Siliguri-based journalist Anuradha Sharma. She said that even though the BJP has found electoral success in North Bengal, it has not been able to deliver on expectations of fulfilling the demands for separate statehood for the region.

“In 2014, Modi had said at a rally in Siliguri, ‘Gorkha ka sapna mera sapna,’” Sharma pointed out. The dreams of the Gorkhas are my dreams. “People have started asking what happened to that dream. Even in this [Union] Budget, Sikkim and Assam got Rs 11,000 crore for flood relief, but North Bengal did not get anything. Half of their MPs [in Bengal] are from North Bengal, but what has the region got?”

Will the BJP’s strategy work?

The short answer is that it is a tall ask. The BJP is banking on the cultural disjunct between North Bengal and the rest of the state and the underdevelopment of the region to alienate it from Kolkata. But in doing so, it might hand over to the Trinamool Congress the potent weapon of invoking Bengali nationalism against yet another partition of the state, experts said.

The Trinamool Congress has already started comparing the BJP to Cyril Radcliffe, the British lawyer who demarcated the boundaries for India’s partition in 1947. On Monday, West Bengal Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee said that Bengal could be divided unless the state Assembly approved such a proposal. “Let them come to partition Bengal, we will show how to stop them,” she said on the floor of the House.

It is not as if the BJP is speaking in one voice on this matter. On Monday, the Leader of Opposition in the state Suvendu Adhikari said that the BJP did not want to divide West Bengal.

Bishnu Prasad Sharma, the party’s MLA from Kurseong, which is part of Darjeeling district, said that Majumdar’s proposal to incorporate North Bengal with the North East was a utopian one.

The comments by Rajya Sabha MP Roy about how plans for statehood for Cooch Behar should be finalised before action is taken on Majumdar’s proposal was also a sign of confusion in the BJP ranks, experts said.

Besides resistance from within, the BJP has come under pressure from smaller parties too. Reacting to Majumdar’s statement, the Kamtapur Progressive Party, which advocates for a separate Kamtapur state, has opposed the North East proposal.

Meanwhile, the Gorkha National Liberation Front, which leads the Gorkhaland movement, has given the BJP an ultimatum to settle the demand by April.

In Jharkhand too, the ruling Jharkhand Mukti Morcha has opposed Dubey’s proposal to form a Union Territory by carving out the state’s Santhal Parganas, Malda and Murshidabad from Bengal, and Araria, Kishanganj and Katihar from Bihar.

Journalist Anuradha Sharma said that the BJP knows that it would not be able to reconcile so many conflicting interests, yet it wanted to test waters. “BJP is floating these ideas to see which one gains the most traction,” she said.