Evictions in Assam, SIR in Bengal? Migrants Pay for BJP's Anti-Bangladeshi Push

Under Sarma, the xenophobic 'miya kheda andolan' has found a new life in Assam while in Bengal, fears of SIR loom.

Since the end of April, Bengali-speaking Muslims have been detained in their dozens, and even hundreds, in the anti-infiltrator drive being carried out in BJP-ruled states of Gujarat, Maharashtra, Odisha, Rajasthan, Madhya Pradesh, and Assam.

(Photo: Aroop Mishra/The Quint)

Eight months pregnant Sunali Bibi from Birbhum, West Bengal, along with her husband and eight-year-old son, were detained in Delhi on suspicion of being illegal Bangladeshis earlier this year amid a crackdown on illegal immigrants in the national capital region.

Now, she and the family are in police custody in Chapainawabganj in northwestern Bangladesh, ironically on charges of being illegal Indian immigrants.

The fate of Sunali Bibi, whose future and that of her unborn child currently hangs in citizenship limbo, is not hers alone.

The ruling BJP government has cast a net to identify migrant workers amongst Bengali Muslims, arbitrarily detain and then forcefully push them to another country against human rights statutes and citizenship laws.

Since Operation Sindoor in May this year, at least 2,000 Bengalis, a majority of them Muslims reportedly from West Bengal and Assam, have been rounded up from BJP-ruled Indian states and pushed across the international border by Indian authorities. The deportation was the result of a Ministry of Home Affairs-driven “verification exercise”, carried out without due process. At least 100 Rohingya refugees were also sent across in the same drive. 

While West Bengal, with the Trinamool Congress in power, has seen political mobilisation and pushback against the forced deportations and ethno-linguistic targeting, in BJP-ruled Assam, the situation remains dire. Caught between statecraft and violent displacement, thousands of stateless migrant workers have been thrown into the woods.

'Civil Society' Vigilantism à la Manipur in Assam

Following several rounds of government eviction drives, at least 20 civil society organisations in upper Assam have raised vigilante groups doing door-to-door verification of Bengali-speaking residents in areas like Sivasagar and other parts of Upper Assam.

The outfits are calling this a “miya kheda andolan” (movement to chase away Bengali Muslims), a throwback to the days of the Assam Agitation in the 1980s when slogans like “Khed oi khed, videkhi khed (oust foreigners) were raised.

While encouraging the ongoing drive, Chief Minister Himanta Biswa Sarma has never been more direct, highlighting the need to “stem demographic invasion” of Upper Assam by “people of one religion.”

Following the Manipur model, where a trained, armed, civil society militia is calling the shots, Sarma has even launched a digital portal through which “indigenous people” can apply for arms license to protect themselves from threats by infiltrators. They will be trained in using arms.

As per reports, these community-based groups have been carrying out combing operations through the state, setting up have set informal checkpoints to track down the movements alleged foreighners.

In another plan, he has announced halting issuing of Aadhaar cards to adults to arrest the infiltrators. After disenfranchisement and erasure would come an all out war.  

To understand what drives the BJP's current anti-Bengali-Muslim drives in Assam, one must go back a century to Assam's distinct brand of identity politics wherein anti-foreigner and anti-Bengali have always played a considerable part.

'Anti-Bengali' to 'Anti-Muslim'

Assam has had violent encounters with the anti-Bengali hatred that has dominated its political soundscape for more than a century now.

The macabre assault, now faded from public memory, is the 'Nellie massacre' of “tirashi”, the year it took place. (18 February 1983). It was perhaps one of the worst communal riots in independent India. Officially, the number of dead was 1,800. 

There is no data on how many were injured. Archival newspaper reports, however, suggest more than 10,000 were killed. At least 688 First Information Reports (FIR) were registered, 299 charge sheets were filed. All the cases were eventually dropped. No one was ever punished or held accountable for the violence.

The record (or lack of it, thereof) is the same as that of neighbouring Meghalaya's decade of ethnic cleansing during the anti-immigration violence of the 1980s.  

Since Nellie, Assam has witnessed communal violence, extremism and terrorism in phases, with a student-led movement wresting political power and winning two elections. This was and remains unprecedented in Indian electoral history.

It is a different matter, though, that the same leaders who rode to power on the “anti-Bangladeshi” sentiment were later discredited and thrown out.

The fear of illegal immigration in Assam is not entirely unfounded. Ad hoc refugee policies and porous borders have put the burden on Assam and neighbouring states. But historical arrangements have driven Assam into a prolonged state of exception and a protracted conflict with multiple “peace processes”. It is a state that invariably falls back into the same 'anti-outsider' rhetoric. Only this time, it is heavily riding on religious rather than indigenous identity.

With the BJP in power and the Union Home Minister comparing Bangladeshi migrants to termites, Sarma, who cut his political teeth in politics with the Assam Agitation, didn’t have to search long for a hook to his political ideology rooted in the idea of "cleansing" the state of Bangladeshis.

One must note that the National Register of Citizens (NRC) and the Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA) are rooted in the same issue. NRC blew up it into a national debate, starting from Assam, where thousands were held in detention centres on suspicion or accusation of not being original citizens of Assam, and many more were rendered stateless. Most of them were Bengali Muslims.

It is was in Assam that a government press photographer was seen jumping over the body of a dead Muslim man shot in police firing. It is where hundreds of Muslims were rounded up on charges of love-jihad (the chief minister mentioned flood-jihad).  

The ongoing persecution of Bengalis is a three-pronged throwback to the Assam Agitation and Sarma, with his experience, knows the potency and volatility of the “Bangladeshi threat”.

This serves him both in terms of regional chauvinism as well as his party’s nationalistic agenda in the run up to the 2026 state assembly elections. 

Pejorative terms like “Bangladeshi”, “Miyan” or “Bongal” have been the rallying points around which Assamese ethno-nationalism has always found salience. But what was earlier anti-Bengali is now more overtly anti-Muslim, and aligns to the pronounced agenda of the ruling national party that governs the state. Though the CAA received its first hard pushback from Assam since it went against the grain of the Assam Accord, today the state is one of the frontline states in BJP’s arsenal of anti-Muslim operations. 

It is clear that the “oust Bangladeshi” slogan will continue to provide fuel to the political class in Assam. But how will it play out in next door Bengal?

In Bengal, a Different Route

For now, the BJP seems to have played into the TMC’s hands. It faced flak for defending statements like Bengali is a Bangladeshi language. Not incorrect, given that Bengali is the language of Bangladesh, but it is also the second most spoken language in India with 97.2 million speakers. Ironically, Shyamaprasad Mukherjee, the founder of Bhartiya Jana Sangh, precursor to BJP is a Bengali. On social media, people reminded the BJP spokesperson that India’s national anthem is also in Bengali.

Curiously, 2026 is election year in West Bengal, a state that BJP has been eyeing greedily for years and where it finds one of the most vociferous opponents in a streetfighter chief minister Mamata Banerjee.

Banerjee is not someone to lose this opportunity and has turned “Bengali identity” and “Bengali asmita” (pride) key planks of her campaign for the 2026 Assembly elections.

The Durga Puja carnival in Kolkata, home to a unique artistic exposition of pandal decoration has decided this year’s theme as harassment against Bengalis and the Bengali language. This will surely echo strongly amongst the voters.  

Banerjee is quick to seize the moment and has already launched an offensive:

“If necessary, there will be a language movement again ... I want to see how many prisons you have."

Banerjee's nephew and heir apparent Abhishek Banerjee, said, “The BJP wants to keep Bengalis in detention camps, but after the elections, we will put them in detention camps.”   

But why would the BJP score a self-goal given the elections are coming up?  The answer may lie in the imminent prospect of the Special Intensive Revision (SIR) drive in Bengal.

Migrant workers will be among the worst affected in this electoral roll exercise, and if there is an electoral math to disenfranchise them, would it be to the BJP’s advantage? Will reverse migration from urban centres increase the burden of unemployment in Bengal, thus creating a small window for BJP to make some gains?

There are more than 22 lakh migrants from Bengal working in other states. But Mamata Banerjee has already announced a new financial scheme to grant returning migrant families Rs 5,000 per month for a year. Unless the BJP has decided to use other means of cornering opposition states with controversial new bills, they need an exit route from this situation.

BJP's Bengali Itch

But what is it about Bengalis and Bangladeshis that makes politicians mobilise public opinion and ratcheting the political discourse to identify a common enemy that is a threat to national security?

Of course, it is the Muslim identity that fits this narrative that Bangladeshis illegally enter through a porous international border, procure fake identification papers and eat into the resources of the country threatening the security and demography.  

Given how India played such an important role in the liberation of Bangladesh, this hatred against the citizens of that country is difficult to comprehend.

I recall a foreign service officer who once served in that country saying how, within a week after the end of the Bangladesh war, India lost interest in Bangladeshi liberation because its purpose was served.

By the time I was in middle school, the term “Bangladeshi” became synonymous with unwanted droves of “illegal immigrants” that were threatening the demography of Assam and Meghalaya while spreading across the country.

This xenophobic hatred of Bangladeshis (which often includes Indian Bengalis as a default setting) finds its roots in the history of the region and the two nations well before the Partition.

Given the contiguous contours of the land and the stream of refugees during the “long Partition” of 25 years till the liberation and creation of Bangladesh, the relationship between Bengalis in Assam and neighbouring states have been complex. Refugee flow into West Bengal was also fraught with challenges but that story of displacement is for another day. 

(Kishalay Bhattacharjee is a journalist and Dean, Jindal School of Journalism and Communication and author most recently of Where the Madness Lies: Citizen Accounts of Identity and Nationalism (Orient Black Swan). This is an opinion piece. All views expressed are the author’s own. The Quint neither endorses nor is responsible for them.)