Migration, religion, language: Bengal's new political churn

Hindustan Times

5 days ago

A lot of working-class settlements across Indian cities – including the national capital Delhi and its suburbs of Noida and Gurugram, Mumbai and others in states where the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) is in power – have seen special drives to detect what the Indian state believes are illegal Bangladeshi migrants. At the receiving end of the drive are thousands of poor, blue-collar Bengali speaking Muslims. Whether or not they are illegal Bangladeshis in India is something which is difficult to ascertain. Even the authorities have been able to flag only a miniscule proportion of these people as illegal Bangladeshis. But that's cold comfort; the chilling effect and inconvenience this drive has unleashed on Bengali speaking Muslims in these cities has affected a lot more people. To be sure, poor Bengali Muslims are not the only kind of underclass to have faced police harassment in India. There are a lot of examples, from evictions in large cities to the police siding with perpetrators of caste violence in villages, where the poor are more likely to suffer at the hands of the law-and-order machinery. However, in many such cases, the poor are also able to fight back by political mobilisation. More often than not, it is by cutting deals with politicians (in return for votes) than direct agitational recourse. This is roughly what political scientist Partha Chaterjee has termed as 'political society' where the poor, even though they are in violation of some laws, are able to preserve their interests by leveraging their votes.
The current crackdown against so-called Bangladeshis (read Bengali Muslims), however, is different. The recourse to 'political society' insurance in the place where the crackdown is taking place is not really an option. The BJP is not interested in votes of Bengali Muslims or Muslims generally. In fact, the BJP being in power is something which is always despite rather than because of the Muslim vote. The 'political society' which is sympathetic to the cause of these people – the anti-BJP political spectrum in West Bengal – does not have jurisdiction in this matter. The ruling Trinamool Congress, which is the overwhelming recipient of Muslim votes in the state of West Bengal, has been extremely vocal on the targeting of Bengali speaking Muslims which is currently underway. But the best Mamata Banerjee and her government can offer these people is a right to stay safely in the state of West Bengal. The irony is, these people would have never left if their home state – assuming most of them are from West Bengal and not Bangladesh – had the kind of economic opportunities which have attracted them to more prosperous, growing and therefore income generating cities outside West Bengal.
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The helplessness involved here is particularly damning for Mamata Banerjee. The BJP has polled almost 40% of the vote share in the past three Lok Sabha and assembly elections held in West Bengal since the 2019 Lok Sabha one. The Trinamool Congress, however, has managed to win each of these elections with a greater vote share than the BJP. Given the fact that almost 30% (it was 27% in 2011 census) of West Bengal's population is Muslim and assuming that they do not vote for the BJP, one can deduce that the BJP already has the support of the majority of Hindus in the state of West Bengal. The only reason it cannot defeat the Trinamool is the latter's support among Muslims. In fact, the rise in Trinamool's footprint in Muslim-dominated regions of north Bengal – it has come at the cost of the Congress and the CPI (M) in the post-2014 period – suggests that there has been a Muslim consolidation behind the Trinamool with the BJP's rise in the state of West Bengal (more on this later). While Muslim support in West Bengal is crucial for Banerjee's and her party's survival in the state, she can do precious little to prevent their harassment in BJP-ruled states where these Muslim migrants go in search of better income opportunities. If this asymmetry continues, Mamata's political capital among the Bengali Muslims is bound to diminish although the chances of Muslims deserting her or her party are still pretty low. There is nothing more demoralizing for a politician than not being able to do something for their core voter base facing persecution.
Two more questions need to be asked before concluding this column.
What does this persecution mean for India's larger political economy? Free migration for the underclass has been the biggest engine of (relative) upward mobility in post-reform India. It is the most effective engine of trickle-down growth in India's small pockets of opulence where high-income middle-class settlements employ many blue-collar workers either directly (domestic helps etc.) or indirectly (myriad forms of manual labour). This is also a process which has largely been caste and religion agnostic so far. Adding a linguistic and religious caveat to these opportunities introduces an in-built inequality in this engine which did not exist earlier.
Also read: Caught between identity, survival: Tale of a Gurugram exodus
Bengal has always had a high share of Muslims in the population and Bengali Muslims have been migrating for a long time in India. What explains this new zeal to stereotype (if not outright persecution) them now? Until 2019, which is when the BJP became a close number two in the state, Muslims were part of both sides of the political aisle in the state and were divided along the fault line of the so-called 'party-society' than the typical secular-communal binary in most Indian states. What is happening in Bengal today is bringing it closer to an Assam kind of polity. The BJP already has an edge among Hindus in Bengal and is trying hard to take it beyond a critical threshold by portraying the Muslim as a foreigner. When a state has a 70%-30% population divide between the majority and minority community and the balance is more equal in large parts of the state (if one were to exclude parts like the tribal majority districts of West Bengal bordering Jharkhand and Odisha) then a communal divide in politics can be an extremely dangerous and even destabilising force.
For all its failures and inadequacies, the CPI (M) which ruled the state from 1977-2011, the early years of which saw a far more unstable refugee/migration problem in West Bengal, was successful in preventing communalism in the state's politics. Political competition, as well as political violence in the state, was religion agnostic. While a status-quo-ante in terms of return of the religion agnostic 'party-society' model is extremely unlikely in West Bengal, business as usual will be increasingly tested in the days to come because of the fundamental asymmetry facing the Bengali Muslims and their party of choice.
To see the ongoing 'anti-Bangladeshi' drives in BJP ruled states without this larger perspective will be missing the woods for the trees.
Roshan Kishore, HT's Data and Political Economy Editor, writes a weekly column on the state of the country's economy and its political fall out, and vice-versa