Explained: This article explains the political background, key decisions, and possible outcomes related to Explained : The Instrumentalization of Bangladesh in the Electoral Politics of West Bengal and Its Impact and why it matters right now.
On 23 January 2026, Suvendu Adhikari, the leader of the West Bengal unit of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), urged non-resident Indians (NRIs) from the East Indian province to vote for the BJP in the upcoming West Bengal Legislative Assembly elections lest the province should turn into a ‘Greater Bangladesh.’ On 17 and 18 January, during public rallies in Malda and Singur, Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi accused the West Bengal government, controlled by the All India Trinamool Congress (TMC), of compromising India’s national security by sheltering ‘infiltrators’ – a euphemism for alleged ‘illegal immigrants from Bangladesh’, and using them as vote banks, while simultaneously blaming the ‘infiltrators’ for inter-communal conflicts in Murshidabad and Malda Districts. On 30 December 2025, Indian Minister of Home Affairs Amit Shah voiced similar arguments at a press conference in Kolkata. Modi, Shah, and Adhikari all have vowed to curb the flow of illegal immigration if the BJP is voted into power in the province. Thus, Bangladesh has emerged as a key issue in the domestic politics of West Bengal.
A Tale of Two Bengals
Bangladesh (formerly East Bengal) and West Bengal constitute the core of the geographical, ethno-linguistic, and historical region of Bengal. During the Partition of India, the Bengal Province was bifurcated into Muslim-majority East Bengal and Hindu-majority West Bengal, with the former turning into the eastern wing of Pakistan (known as East Pakistan since 1956), and the latter turning into a province of the Indian Union. East Pakistan obtained its independence from Pakistan in 1971 after a brutal war and transformed into the independent state of Bangladesh. Meanwhile, West Bengal was ruled by a host of centrist and left-wing political parties, including the Indian National Congress (INC), the Bangla Congress, the Communist Party of India (Marxist) [CPI(M)], and now the TMC. However, since the BJP’s rise to power at the center, the right-wing party’s West Bengal unit has emerged as a strong contender to power in the province, and it is using anti-immigrant and anti-Bangladeshi rhetoric, coupled with the party’s traditional anti-Muslim polemic, to generate popular support.
The Opening: Anti-immigrant and Anti-Muslim Rhetoric
During the Bangladeshi War of Independence, nearly 10 million Bangladeshis had taken shelter in India, and 7.2 million of them were hosted in West Bengal. After Bangladesh’s independence, almost all of the refugees were repatriated, with only 60,000 refugees remaining on Indian territory by 25 March 1972. However, a grave misperception continued to persist among parts of the Indian population that many Bangladeshi refugees have illegally remained in India and never returned to Bangladesh.
This misperception, coupled with the fact that some Bangladeshis had indeed immigrated to India to escape dire socio-economic predicaments after independence, generated a distorted picture of immigration from Bangladesh to India among the Indians. Right-wing and populist political parties in India, including the BJP, used the issue to create an exaggerated threat perception for electoral politics. In the 21st century, Indian politicians claimed that between 12 and 20 million Bangladeshis are living in India as illegal immigrants, but the Indian government has conceded that it does not have any real data on the actual number of illegal immigrants.
Meanwhile, BJP leader Adhikari continues to insist that there are 12.5 million ‘illegal immigrants from Bangladesh’ in the voter list of West Bengal, but his claims remain unsubstantiated by evidence. But this rhetoric resonates with parts of the West Bengal electorate, who erroneously view the province’s structural and socio-economic ills as partially caused by the ‘generosity’ of the provincial government towards the alleged ‘infiltrators.’ Moreover, the BJP has long accused the TMC of ‘Muslim appeasement,’ and sought to mobilize the Bengali Hindus against what its publicists describe as the ‘Islamization of West Bengal.’ Since Bangladesh is a Muslim-majority state, the ‘illegal immigrants’ are viewed as primarily Muslims, and Hindu nationalists often end up conflating Bengali Muslims of West Bengal with ‘Bangladeshi Muslim illegal immigrants,’ resulting in the dehumanization of both communities.
On its part, the BJP seeks to capitalize on growing anti-immigrant and anti-Muslim sentiments among the population of West Bengal to undermine the TMC government and establish a BJP-led government in the province.
The Mid-game: Anti-Bangladeshi Polemic
This has intensified after the July Uprising of 2024, which resulted in the fall of the Awami League-led government in Bangladesh that used to maintain close ties with India. Afterwards, the relations between India and Bangladesh has gone on a downward spiral. The change of government in the country has strengthened Islamist forces, and resulted in some incidents of violence against the Bangladeshi Hindus. However, most of these incidents are in fact caused by personal or political motives and not by religious considerations, and the country’s interim government has undertaken prompt actions against the perpetrators, unlike in India where the lynching of religious and ethnic minorities has become widespread.
While any act of violence against the people of any community is deplorable and should be strictly punished, Indian right-wing political elements, especially in West Bengal, are using the incidents in Bangladesh to drum up anti-Bangladeshi sentiment among the population, and thus anti-immigrant, anti-Muslim, and anti-Bangladeshi polemics are collaging into one grand narrative of fear and hatred. In fact, after a Bangladeshi Hindu citizen was killed over professional rivalry in December 2025, West Bengal BJP leader Adhikari called upon India to do to Bangladesh what Israel has done to Gaza since 7 October 2023. Israeli strikes on Gaza have killed at least 71,660 Palestinians, of whom some 80% were civilians, and the United Nations (UN) has identified it as a genocide. So, West Bengal BJP leaders are openly and directly calling for genocide and ethnic cleansing against the Bangladeshis, and this has been rightly called out by TMC leaders.
The Endgame: The Throne of Kolkata
Since 2016, the politics of West Bengal has witnessed three important trends: the continuation of the dominance of the TMC, the meteoric rise of the BJP, and the effective political elimination of the CPI(M) and the INC. The BJP had won only three seats in 2016 Legislative Assembly elections, but in 2021, it won 77 seats, an astonishing 96% increase. With the continued rule of the BJP at the center, the West Bengal BJP is planning to overturn the TMC in the upcoming elections, and so it is unabashedly instrumentalizing the specter of Bangladesh for mobilizing those voters in West Bengal who hold anti-immigrant, anti-Muslim, and anti-Bangladeshi sentiments. In effect, Bangladesh has become a sort of boogeyman in the politics of West Bengal.
However, the instrumentalization of Bangladesh in West Bengal’s electoral politics would only harm the already strained Indo–Bangladeshi relations in the long run. It would have been wiser if the two had pursued friendly, cooperative, and good-neighbourly relations after the July Uprising. But the BJP is playing a game of thrones in West Bengal, seeking to unseat the TMC, and it is unlikely that the use of the ‘Bangladeshi threat’ as a political instrument in West Bengal would cease anytime soon.
[Md. Himel Rahman is currently serving as Lecturer, Department of International Relations, Gopalganj Science and Technology University. His articles have been published on several platforms, including The Diplomat, The Interpreter, Asia Times, South Asian Voices, The Nation, The Daily Star, Dhaka Tribune, and New Age.]