Of all the implications of the BJP’s famous victory in West Bengal, the one that stands out from a longer historical perspective is perhaps its relation to the “idea of India”.

If the numbers are to be believed, they indicate a scale of acceptance for Hindu nationalism in West Bengal that exceeds even the levels seen in BJP strongholds such as Gujarat and Uttar Pradesh.

The Bharatiya Janata Party has been declared the winner in 207 of Bengal’s 294 assembly seats. It also retained neighbouring Assam for the third time, winning 82 seats in the 126-member assembly. Another 20 seats there were won by its allies, pushing the tally of the BJP-led National Democratic Alliance to 102.

In both states, the number of Muslim MLAs who will sit on the ruling party benches is the same: zero.

The opposition in Assam has 24 MLAs, of whom 22 are Muslims, and nearly all of them are from areas with a high concentration of Bengal-origin Miya Muslims, such as the Lower Assam districts of Dhubri and Goalpara, and the Barak Valley districts of Karimganj and Hailakandi. There are other Assamese-speaking Muslim communities in Assam, such as the Goria and Moria, but none of the elected Muslim MLAs is from these communities.

In West Bengal, 40 of the 87 opposition MLAs are Muslims. They, too, have been elected from pockets with high concentrations of Muslim voters, in districts such as Murshidabad, Malda and parts of South 24 Parganas. They are, of course, Bengali-speaking Muslims.

In other words, in Assam the opposition is almost entirely composed of Muslim MLAs of East Bengal origin, while in West Bengal a majority of the opposition MLAs are Bengali Muslims. In both cases, they represent the community most likely to be viewed there – and elsewhere in India – as “Bangladeshi ghuspetiyas”, because of their shared linguistic, religious and cultural heritage with the Bengali Muslims who comprise the majority in Bangladesh.

How the hurdles were overcome in Bengal, Assam

The spectre of “Bangladeshi infiltration” was a crucial poll plank for the BJP in both West Bengal and Assam. The rhetoric and anxiety over the alleged “influx” of millions of undocumented Bangladeshis into India, a discourse in Assam that predates the creation of Bangladesh in 1971, has now been successfully exported to West Bengal.

The national mainstreaming of this Assam model of politics began long ago. It achieved scale with the debates and controversies surrounding the National Register of Citizens (NRC) in Assam, and the related issue of the Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA). The political logic behind this was clearly stated by Home Minister Amit Shah in a speech in West Bengal in 2019, when he said “aap chronology samjhiye” before explaining that only “ghuspetiyas” would be evicted through the NRC, while Hindu asylum-seekers from Bangladesh would be granted citizenship under the CAA.

The problem this politics faced in Assam was that there existed a century-and-a-half-old tradition of linguistic politics that had historically defined Assamese nationalism in opposition to Bengali linguistic identity. Therefore, the CAA’s inclusion of Bengali Hindus from Bangladesh within the “imagined community” of India was unacceptable to many in Assam.

That problem seems to have been overcome. Assamese nationalism has been successfully swallowed whole by Hindu nationalism, with the result that Bengali Hindus and Assamese Hindus, along with the many tribes such as Bodo, Rabha, Dimasa, Mising and others, have all been successfully incorporated into the Hindu nationalist fold.

In Bengal, unlike Assam, Bengali nationalism was never a thing. What existed instead was a relatively mild form of Bengali identity politics represented by the Trinamool Congress. Unlike Assam, where the far end of the Assamese nationalist spectrum was represented by armed separatists such as the United Liberation Front of Asom, even the extreme fringe of Bengali identity politics is represented by a tiny outfit called Bangla Pokkho, led by Dr Garga Chatterjee, a neuroscientist from Harvard, whose main demands revolve around reservations of jobs for locals in government service.

The slogan of “Joy Bangla”, meaning “victory to Bengal”, which prevailed in 2021, has now been comprehensively defeated, according to the declared results, by the slogan of “Jai Shri Ram”.

The demography of Bengal made this an unlikely feat. There are at least 100 assembly seats with a Muslim population of more than 30 percent. The BJP’s politics, made clear through the rabble-rousing speeches of its leaders, was plainly anti-Muslim and aimed at consolidating Hindu votes.

In other words, the BJP began with a structural disadvantage, since its chances of winning any of those 100-odd seats appeared slim. The TMC, or for that matter any “secular” party such as the Congress or CPI(M), sought to secure a plurality of votes from the entire electorate, Hindus and Muslims alike. The BJP, by contrast, sought a plurality only from the 70 percent or less of the electorate that is Hindu. Yet it managed to win at least 18 such seats. 

More significantly, it won 207 seats in a state with a roughly 27 percent Muslim population, which would have required the support of an estimated two-thirds of Hindu voters, assuming it got a negligible proportion of Muslim votes.

The picture in Assam, which has a 34 percent Muslim population, is complicated by the presence of NDA allies for whom Hindu nationalist rhetoric may not necessarily be the foremost concern. However, they clearly have no objection to being part of the Hindutva camp, and that camp would have secured the support of an estimated 70 percent of Hindu voters to win 102 of the state’s 126 seats.

For comparison, the estimated share of Hindu votes secured by the BJP in Uttar Pradesh in 2022, according to post-poll surveys by CSDS-Lokniti, was approximately 54 percent. The corresponding number for Gujarat was 61 percent.

A new conflict with East Pakistan?

Assam and Bengal now appear to have left Uttar Pradesh and Gujarat behind in their embrace of Hindu nationalism. The wholehearted embrace of the Hindu nationalist “idea of India” in Assam and Bengal, both once regarded as deeply “secular” societies in their own ways, represents, in a sense, the final victory of the two-nation theory in eastern India.

The acceptance of this idea has become possible because of several interconnected factors. Mutual antipathy towards “Bangladeshis” among the Indian Hindu Right, and towards Hindus and Indians among sections of the Bangladeshi Islamic Right, combined with the spread of social media, have been crucial.

Since the NRC-CAA agitation in 2019, Bangladesh has lurched rightward, and now West Bengal has followed.

In the short term, “nationalist” political entrepreneurs on both sides of the border may continue to harvest votes from this polarisation. In the slightly longer term, however, the consequences could prove dangerous.

We seem to be locked onto a trajectory that may eventually turn anti-“Bangladeshi” sentiment in eastern India, and its mirror image in Bangladesh, into a renewed version of conflict with the erstwhile East Pakistan, this time in a geopolitical space shaped by competing superpowers USA and China, both of which are increasingly present in India’s immediate neighbourhood.

Samrat is an author and journalist. His most recent book is Northeast India: A Political History, published by Hurst in the UK and HarperCollins in India.

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