Why BJP has toned down its anti-Bangladesh rhetoric in run-up to Bengal polls

In December, Suvendu Adhikari, the leader of opposition in the West Bengal Assembly, had led a series of high-octane demonstrations in Kolkata against the lynching of Dipu Chandra Das, a Bangladeshi Hindu. “The blood of Dipu Das cries out for justice,” Adhikari tweeted out, posting a video of himself prostrating dramatically before Hindu ascetics outside the deputy high commission of Bangladesh.

The protests were part of the Bharatiya Janata Party’s efforts to derive political mileage out of the communal situation across India’s eastern border. According to the saffron party, the plight of minority Hindus in Bangladesh foretold what would become of Hindus in Bengal if what it calls demographic change is not stopped.

For a while, it seemed as if the BJP had found its central poll plank for the Assembly elections in the state, which were only a few months away at the time.

However, that was not to be.

Since Tarique Rahman became prime minister in February, the BJP has noticeably omitted the mention of Bangladesh from its political messaging in Bengal. The party’s campaign has, in recent weeks, mostly focused on highlighting crime and corruption under the ruling Trinamool Congress as well as promising a range of cash-transfer schemes. Even when it does talk about so-called infiltrators, it takes care not to mention the government of Bangladesh.

This has left Hindutva activists and sympathisers feeling disappointed. Some of them told Scroll that the reset in ties between New Delhi and Dhaka after Rahman’s victory has meant that the Modi government is going soft on his government. As a result, the Bengal BJP is unable to reap political dividends from the communal situation in Bangladesh.

Change in tack

BJP politicians acknowledge that the party has dialed down its anti-Bangladesh rhetoric, but frame the shift as a natural one.

“We were aggressive when Hindus were facing atrocities in Bangladesh,” said Anirban Ganguly, a member of the BJP’s national executive committee and the chairman of the Syama Prasad Mookerjee Research Foundation, a Hindutva thinktank. “Now, with the new dispensation, those kinds of atrocities have practically stopped. It is not a dispensation which is talking about our landlocked Northeast or collaborating with Pakistan on the nuclear issue. There is no provocation from that side.”

Ganguly, who contested the 2021 Assembly elections as well as the 2024 Lok Sabha polls from Bengal, is not in the fray this time. Still, he is touring the state with a book that he co-authored, outlining the prime minister’s vision for the state in small public gatherings. The Bengali edition of the book is titled Narendra Niti: Banglar Pragati. Narendra’s Plan: Bengal’s Progress.

The researcher-author explained how the suffering of Hindus in Bangladesh was always on the minds of Bengali Hindus in India, given the memories of Partition. His party, he added, was trying to tell them that if Trinamool’s politics of Muslim appeasement continued in West Bengal, they would meet the same fate.

“For us, Hindu consolidation against infiltration is a big issue now,” Ganguly claimed. “The prime minister is raising it in every rally. We need not name Bangladesh.”

But other BJP leaders are not pleased with this tiptoeing. Tathagata Roy, the former governor of Tripura and Meghalaya who served as the BJP’s president in Bengal over two decades ago, expressed his disappointment over New Delhi’s posture.

“I would have liked the issue of Bangladeshi Hindus to have been given a little more emphasis,” he said, arguing that the persecution of Hindus had not completely stopped under Rahman. “Perhaps, the central government is exerting quiet pressure. But being a little more vociferous would have satisfied me.”

Roy, 82, belongs to a family that traces its roots back to Bangladesh and has written a book on the uprooting of Hindus from that country. He put the change in tack from his party down to the caste divide in Bengali society.

Upper-caste Hindus made up the bulk of refugees who came from East Pakistan to West Bengal in the initial years after Partition, according to him. They managed to get white-collar jobs and did relatively well for themselves in comparison to the lower-caste Hindus who stayed behind.

“The upper-caste and lower-caste Bengalis have been so far removed from each other that they have very little empathy for each other,” Roy complained. “Their means of livelihood are different.”

Most of the Hindus remaining in Bangladesh, he added, belonged to the lower castes and practiced agriculture or owned small businesses. Their caste identity means that their plight does not by itself generate a surge of political support in Bengal, not even among refugees who once faced the same persecution as them. The BJP is, therefore, focussing more on corruption and cash transfers now.

‘It is very complicated’

For Santanu Sinha, the BJP’s approach was a reminder of the limited success Hindutva has had in cultivating what he calls a shared identity and consciousness among the Hindus of West Bengal. Sinha is the president of Hindu Samhati, a splinter group of Bengali Hindutva activists who broke from the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh because they found it to be timid.

He contended that if the saffron party had continued talking about Bangladeshi Hindus, the tactic would have boomeranged in districts that are far from the border and do not have refugees. The Trinamool, in his view, still understood the psyche of the average Bengali, particularly those who were not refugees, better than the BJP.

“When we try to talk about Bangladesh in Medinipur [about 200 km from the border], Trinamool workers tell voters that we plan to settle refugees in their area,” Sinha said. “It is a very complicated problem. Changing the minds of all Hindus is very difficult.”

While dyed-in-the-wool Hindutva activists understand these challenges, ground-level BJP workers struggle to explain why the party has gone silent about Bangladesh all of a sudden.

Sujit Jaiswal, a middle-aged BJP volunteer in the Jorasanko area of north Kolkata, admitted that he did not know anything about the subject. “Only the leadership can say what is going on between the governments of the two countries,” he stated frankly.

This sentiment was echoed by Samar Dey, a 72-year-old BJP worker helping the party’s candidate in Maniktala. However, Dey insisted that the BJP had not stopped raising the issue of so-called illegal immigration from Bangladesh.

“Mamata [Banerjee] is not giving land to the Border Security Force for fencing the Bangladesh border,” he alleged. “People from her party have been caught with bags full of fake Aadhaar cards and voter ID cards.”

The BJP hopes that this emphasis on what it calls infiltration will be enough to mobilise voters. But even voters who believe that the entry of undocumented migrants from Bangladesh has led to an increase in the Muslim population of Bengal don’t consider this to be an election issue.

Kartik Das, 58, has sold vegetables in the upscale Lake Market area of south Kolkata for over three decades. He pointed at the homes of Hindus in the neighbourhood and claimed that nearly all young residents either lived in other states or had moved out of India altogether. The population of Muslims, on the other hand, was growing because they had more children and some of them had supposedly come from Bangladesh, according to him.

When asked what would decide who he votes for, though, Das simply patted his belly. The border problem, he argued, was irreparable. It was better to focus on bread-and-butter issues.

“I don’t think anybody can stop infiltration,” Das said. “It is an international problem. I don’t worry about it.”

He added that he had enough problems of his own: “My income has reduced because people are ordering vegetables online. I don’t have time to worry about anything else.”