BJP's Bid to Divide Bangla Rooted in Hindutva Politics of Linguistic Exclusion

Only by weakening the linguistic identity can one establish the religious identity of a group.

By defending the Delhi police action, the BJP leaders proved that they really wanted to portray the Bengali used in Bangladesh as a different language

Photo: Kamran Akhter/The Quint)

In July, multiple spokespersons of India’s ruling force, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), defended the Delhi police action of describing Bengali as ‘Bangladeshi language’, triggering an uproar.

The Bengali-speaking people are India’s second-largest ethno-linguist group, with over 10 crore population spread mostly over the eastern and northeastern states. A larger population, of about 16 crore, live in Bangladesh. Referring to Bengali as ‘Bangladeshi national language’ in Delhi police’s official documents was an insult to Indian Bengalis, politicians, activists and cultural personalities from West Bengal, Assam and Tripura alleged.

By defending the Delhi police action, the BJP leaders, including the party’s information & technology helmsman-cum-Bengal unit co-incharge Amit Malviya and the Bengal unit president Samik Bhattacharya, proved they really want to portray the Bengali used in Bangladesh as a different language.

This might appear to be ignorance; but, in all likelihood, is deliberate omission of the fact that the spoken Bengali differs widely even within India, but the written language is the same across the border. There is a ‘standard Bengali’ followed everywhere.

How ludicrous this proposition of splitting Bengali is can be easily ascertained by reading the major Bengali dailies published from the West Bengal capital of Kolkata, the Tripura capital of Agartala and Bangladesh national capital of Dhaka, and for regional variations one may even take a look at more localised Bengali news publications like those from Assam’s Silchar, Siliguri of northern West Bengal and Jharkhand’s Ranchi.

It’s one language—Bengali—that’s used everywhere. And it’s seemingly strange that the BJP claims otherwise.

The Motive

The BJP’s move puzzled many political observers and even a section of BJP leaders in West Bengal, the prime homeland of the Bengalis in India where Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s party is the main opposition to chief minister Mamata Banerjee’s Trinamool Congress (TMC).

Many wondered why the BJP hurt ethnic sentiments of the Bengalis and allow the TMC to play on ethno-regionalist pride, less than a year ahead of the Assembly elections.

For observers closer home, this is not surprising. Since Modi’s rise at the national level propelling the BJP’s growth in Bengal, the saffron camp has been busy in the ‘otherisation’ of Bangladesh—Bangladesh is what West Bengal must not become. ‘Preventing West Bengal’s transformation into West Bangladesh’ has been their key political plank.

It’s the history of the Partition and subsequent atrocities on Hindus in post-Partition eastern Bengal that the BJP and its ideological-organisational parent, the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), wants to keep alive in West Bengal more than anything else.

Because of the shared cultural history, there exists a kind of pan-Bengali-connect. From music and literature to customs, a cultural connection continues between Bengali speakers on both sides of the border despite the political separation.

The Politics

A section of socio-culturally influential Bengalis in West Bengal do tend to take pride in citing how Bengalis have repeatedly laid down their lives to protect their language—first the death of four students in Dhaka of the then East Pakistan in police firing on 21 February, 1952; then the killing on 11 protesters in firing by the Assam police in Silchar on 19 May, 1961; and then the Bangladesh Liberation War of 1971 that claimed hundreds of thousands of lives.

However, religious conflict has also played a key role in dividing linguistic identity, which is why the Bengalis have often become intensely divided over prioritising linguistic or religious identity.

After all, Hindutva or political Hindu conservatism, and the Hindu nationalist fear-psychosis that Hindus are endangered, have their roots in nineteenth century Bengal. The same holds true for pan-Islamic tendencies.

Though linguistic identity gained prominence during the first three decades of the twentieth century, the land ultimately partitioned due to the dominance of religious identity. Nevertheless, eastern Bengal, after separating from India in 1947 on religious grounds, separated from Pakistan in 1971 by championing linguistic identity.

While Islamist forces in Bangladesh have continued to try to subdue the linguistic Bengali identity by the Muslim religious identity, Hindutva forces are trying the same in West Bengal. Only by weakening the linguistic identity can they establish the religious identity.

Culturally separating the Bengals weakens the Bengali linguistic pride, as it takes away a large share of the global Bengali population and literary and cultural heritage.

Notably, Bangla and Bangali nomenclatures themselves come from Banga, the part of Bengal that now lies in Bangladesh.

This is why, within the Bengali Hindu community in West Bengal, people having roots in eastern Bengal are referred to as Bangaal and those with western roots are called Ghoti. Whether Bangaal or Ghoti, however much their dialects may differ, they are all Bengali-speakers.

On the other side of the coin of influence, it is the Bengali of the southwestern west Bengal—the Rarhi dialect of Kolkata-Hooghly-Bardhaman-Nadia belt—that emerged as the standard Bengali even in eastern Bengal, Assam and Tripura.

Bengali language and culture is, therefore, indivisible by state or national borders. However, since Bangladesh is ‘the other’ for saffron politics in Bengal, it must be cut off from West Bengal’s cultural psyche. Therefore, they try to split the language.

The Ploys

In West Bengal, the conflict between linguistic and religious identities started with the advent of the BJP since 2014 and the Modi government’s aggressive push for popularising Hindi across the country.

The following is, in short, the Sangh Parivar’s Bengal narrative: Syama Prasad Mookerjee ensured that Bengal got Partitioned and the Hindu majority western part stayed in India, thus ensuring a homeland for Bengali Hindus, which now must be prevented from turning into an western extension of Bangladesh, the Muslim homeland notorious for persecuting the Hindus.

It is for this reason that the Union home ministry has not approved West Bengal assembly’s resolution to rename the state simply as Bengal or Bangla. The BJP argued that dropping ‘West’ from the name of the state amounts to erasing the history of Partition.

The argument sounds lame—as we have a state named Punjab and so has Pakistan. Punjab does not bear the prefix of ‘East’ in its name. Does it erase Punjab’s history of Partition?

But for Bengal, the pyre of the Partition must be kept burning.

Since Modi’s ascent to India’s premiership, every time political and socio-cultural activists in Bengal tried to highlight Bengali cultural-religious distinctness from that of northern and western India, the BJP tried to counter the linguistic pride by accusing them of being pro-Bangladeshi.

They objected to the shouting of Joy Bangla (Hail Bengal), a key slogan of the Bangladesh Liberation War that also reverberated in West Bengal during the liberation days.

The Pushback

Joy Bangla started gaining popularity in West Bengal in 2017-2018 due to its frequent use by the Bengali ethnic rights group, Bangla Pokkho. The TMC later adopted Joy Bangla as one of the party’s three slogans, apart from Jai Hind and Vande Mataram.

BJP called the ‘importing of a Bangladeshi slogan’ as part of a grand design to convert West Bengal into West Bangladesh.

The attitude is similar to what the Hindutva adopts for Tamil ethnic pride, calling Dravidian politicians inheritors of ‘secessionist’ and ‘separatist’ ideology.

For, in the Sangh Parivaar vision, all other identities must be subservient to the Hindu identity. And Hindi is the medium of spreading Hindutva, the political form of Hindu conservatism.

The Bengali linguistic and cultural identity is proving to be a stumbling block for the Hindutva camp in West Bengal from at least two aspects:

1. It hinders their mission of establishing the Hindu identity among Indians over all other identities (linguistic and caste, for example)

2. Bengali ethnic sentiments, which often amount to cultural pride, fight back the saffron push for imposing Hindi as the national language.

As part of their mission of Hinduising Bengal, they wanted to undermine the importance of and emotions around February 21, the International Mother Language Day, as the occasion is intrinsically linked to the Bengali language movement in what was then East Pakistan.

Hindu nationalists not only want to reduce the importance of 21 February—a day celebrated in Bengal widely with cultural programmes—but also overlook the second ‘language martyrs’ day’ for the Bengali people, the May 1961 incident of Silchar. Highlighting Bengali-Assamese ethnic conflict is out of their syllabus.

Instead, in 2020, they floated a new occasion called Paschimbanga Matri Bhasha Dibas on September 20. This was to commemorate the death of two activists of the RSS student wing, Akhil Bharatiya Vidyarthi Parishad (ABVP), in alleged police firing during a student protest on a school campus.

While the students were protesting deployment of new teachers for Sanskrit and Urdu—whereas the students needed vacancies in Bengali and maths filled—the BJP, RSS and ABVP claimed the two students died fighting ‘Urdu imposition on Bengalis’ and called them ‘language martyrs.’ The appointment of the Sanskrit teacher became an inconvenient appendage for their narrative.

The BJP leaders then argued that the people of West Bengal should stop celebrating 21 February and adopt 20 September as the real mother tongue day.

With the recent classification of Bengali spoken and written in Bangladesh as ‘Bangladeshi language’, the same ‘operation’ keeps unfolding—to reduce the significance of linguistic identity among West Bengal Bengalis to ‘integrate’ them more with the ‘mainstream India’; in short, it’s part of their effort to 'Indianise' and 'Hinduise' Bengalis.

(Snigdhendu Bhattacharya is a journalist who writes on politics, history, culture, environment, and climate change. He has authored books on leftwing insurgency and Hindu nationalism. This is an opinion piece. The views expressed above are the author's own. The Quint neither endorses nor is responsible for the same.)