Explained : From Bengal to Dhaka: The new politics of exclusion and Its Impact

On both the west and eastern flanks of our borders, cricket teams of South Asian nations have signalled their worsening relations with India via sports boycotts. The Pakistani cricket team will boycott one match against India in the ICC T20 World Cup, while Bangladesh has chosen to stay out of the entire tournament rather than play in India (after it was denied venues outside India). Although this is terrible for the sport, it signals identity politics inside all the nations involved, where pointing fingers at “the other” is part of domestic positioning. If we were to hark back to history, we could say that both East and West Pakistan are boycotting India, but what’s unfolding is not a laughing matter.

Pakistan has always been the enemy in popular imagination, and we have fought real military battles with that nation. But this latest round of “enmity” begins with Bangladesh, once East Pakistan, whose independence we supported in 1971 and subsequently maintained excellent relations with.

The escalation began with the Board of Control for Cricket in India’s instructions to Indian Premier League franchise Kolkata Knight Riders, owned by the film star Shah Rukh Khan, to drop Bangladeshi bowler Mustafizur Rahman from its 2026 squad, citing “recent developments”, without further elaboration. Was this linked to public anger in the country over attacks on Hindus in Bangladesh or unease over other issues? It was never clarified.

Not surprisingly, Bangladesh raised security concerns about its entire team touring India, stating that if one player could not travel to India owing to “recent developments”, then the entire team could face security threats, a concern India has dismissed. The fact that the country’s deposed Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina, currently in exile, has begun making political statements from Indian soil, has also been formally objected to by Dhaka. But hanging over all of this is the cloud of toxic political rhetoric about “Bangladeshis” and “infiltrators”.

Take election-bound Assam, currently ruled by the BJP, where Chief Minister Himanta Biswa Sarma has been pushing undiluted hate and apartheid against Bengali-speaking Muslims. The words have escalated from dog whistling to open shouting about using verification drives and notices to harass an entire section of society, referred to as “miyans”. The State, which borders Bangladesh, has pursued demolition drives in settlements largely inhabited by Bengali-speaking Muslims. Similar actions have now reportedly begun in Tripura too, a State also governed by a BJP-led alliance and which shares a border with Bangladesh.

Bengal SIR brouhaha

On both sides of the Bengal border, meanwhile, elections are approaching. In West Bengal, the Trinamool Congress, led by Mamata Banerjee, has been in power since 2011, and voters will decide by March-April this year whether they want her to stay on for another five years. The principal opposition is the BJP (38 per cent of votes in 2021 to TMC’s 48 per cent). The saffron forces are always keen to conquer new territory, and Bengal would be a jewel in the crown as it is crucial to the excavation of historical grievances of Partition that underpin the ideology of the Hindu right. After all, the first partition in British India on Hindu–Muslim lines took place in Bengal in 1905.

The BJP has no charismatic leader to match Mamata Banerjee but it does have influence over Central institutions that are meant to function independently. What it lacks in chemistry, it seeks to make up through arithmetic, courtesy the Election Commission of India’s Special Intensive Revision (SIR) of electoral rolls. This has led to an uproar in the State over deletions from voter lists, particularly where minority communities have been impacted, and allegations that routine administrative processes are being converted into political instruments. And that is precisely what Himanta Biswa Sarma is threatening in Assam—that “miyans” would be disenfranchised.

The generic term used by RSS-BJP cadre for people they wish to expel from the country and erase from the electoral rolls is “Bangladeshi”, a phrase that has become both abuse and threat. Hardly any such “infiltrators” were found during the SIR that was conducted in Bihar in 2025, but worldwide, right-wing mobilisations have rarely allowed facts to stand in the way of rhetoric. “Us versus them” campaigns thrive on innuendo and fear rather than evidence. There have been some disturbing cases of Bengali-speaking bona fide Indian Muslims being pushed across the border; they finally found their way back and challenged their deportation in courts, but some just vanish.

Bangladesh election

Bangladesh, meanwhile, is heading into an even more consequential election on February 12, to elect a government and give shape to a republic emerging after the protests that culminated in the ouster and flight to India of four-term Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina. The main contest is between the Bangladesh Nationalist Party and a coalition that includes the Jamaat-e-Islami. The oldest party, the Awami League, is not being allowed to contest because of its association with Hasina.

On principle, this is troubling. In South Asia, regimes were ousted after mass protests in Sri Lanka (2022) and Nepal (2025), but parties linked with former leaders were still permitted to participate in elections. Political transition without political pluralism carries risks for democratic legitimacy. We, thus, inhabit a landscape of imperfect democracies. Pakistan has always been a failed democracy, but now the political annihilation of a party is being attempted in Bangladesh while large-scale deletion of voters is being alleged in parts of India.

The politics of exclusion now spills across borders. Since the ouster of the Hasina government in Bangladesh, members of the Hindu minority have faced targeted violence, with several incidents recorded on video and widely circulated. Between the final weeks of 2025 and early 2026, rights groups estimate that around a dozen Hindus were killed in brutal mob attacks.

It remains to be seen what political order finally emerges in Bangladesh, whose 1971 liberation from Pakistan was widely understood as an assertion of linguistic and cultural identity rather than the birth of an Islamist state. That original impulse has weakened as political Islam has reportedly found organisational space.

An increasingly Islamist political discourse in Bangladesh feeds reciprocal radicalisation in India, just as the continuing record of hate crimes in India over the past decade feeds narratives in the region that secularism has failed in the land of Nehru and Gandhi.

The BJP’s consolidation in India and the growth of Hindu nationalism, alongside the growing clout of the Jamaat-e-Islami in Bangladesh, banned during much of Hasina’s reign, suggest that the foundational ideological pillars of both nations at independence are being shaken today.

Sport and identity politics

Cricket wars have traditionally mirrored political disputes in the subcontinent, earlier between India and Pakistan and now between India and Bangladesh. Media and public discourse also follow political cues. But when a sport gets drawn into identity and regional politics, it is not merely cricket that loses; rather one of the few remaining spaces of uncomplicated people-to-people contact disappears. In Bengal, where linguistic and cultural bonds with Bangladesh run deep, this hardening of sentiment could feel jarring in a culture where language sub-nationalism overrides religious identity.

It is that which the RSS/BJP ultimately seeks to change beyond their performance in the upcoming State elections—policies and narratives in Assam and Bengal are part of a larger civilisational project. But for now, Rabindranath Tagore is still the author of Bangladesh’s national anthem, and hilsa fish still crosses borders.

What is clear is that 79 years after Partition, national identity across the subcontinent remains a work in progress. In a region that was witness to one of the largest forced migrations in history, turning borders into a permanent political obsession and repeatedly excavating old fault lines represents a retreat from the humanitarian ideals to which our Constitution is formally committed to. It also marks a departure from the pluralist dreams that once inspired Bangladesh’s own struggle for independence from Pakistan.

Saba Naqvi is a Delhi-based journalist and author of four books who writes on politics and identity issues.

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