WHEN I try to understand why Bengal’s arguments about ‘outsiders’ feel both intimate and cruel, my mind returns to Bheramara — my childhood town — where the border was never only a line on a map. It was a presence in the air: in the way surnames were whispered, in the way people paused before saying where they came from, in the way a familiar dialect could suddenly sound like an accusation.
Partition arrived there as a slow churn, not a single rupture. Some households left with trunks, certificates and the confidence of being legible to the state; others arrived with little more than a trade in their hands and a tired look that children still learn to recognise. Many stayed because poverty offered no exit — because leaving requires money and even grief has a price. The bazar kept trading, the classrooms filled, and weddings happened. But loss lingered in locked rooms, in missing faces at Eid and puja, in stories that would begin and then stop, as if the rest of the sentence could not be survived.
That is why today’s demographic panic feels like a theft of lived complexity. Bheramara was never a pure container of one community’s uninterrupted past; it was a crowded archive of departures and arrivals, of quiet accommodations, of dignity rebuilt through work. When politics turns such histories into a single accusatory word — ‘infiltrator,’ ‘outsider,’ ‘threat’ — it does not protect memory. It raids it, distils it, and weaponizes it.
Fear, memory and the manufacture of the enemy
THERE are rivers in Bengal that do not know which country they belong to. They rise, they silt, they shift — and the people along their banks have moved with them for centuries, long before Partition learned to turn rivers into borders and neighbours into threats. That porousness is Bengal’s oldest truth. It is also the truth now being targeted for destruction.
My previous essays argued that Bengal’s crisis cannot be unlocked with blunt binaries — majority versus minority, secular versus communal, native versus outsider. It is a wounded delta where language, class, caste, migration, memory and faith accumulate like silt — slowly, invisibly, with structural consequence. It cannot be drained into a slogan. Yet that is precisely what is being attempted, with remarkable efficiency and little shame.
The arithmetic of anxiety
WHAT is collapsing across parts of India’s electoral landscape — West Bengal, Tamil Nadu, Kerala — is not merely party fortune. It is the inherited certainty that ideology could be geography: Bengal’s left afterlife, Kerala’s class-inflected pragmatism, Tamil Nadu’s Dravidian political civilisation. Those loyalties have not vanished, but they no longer command unconditional trust because trust requires a future to believe in. Economic insecurity, digital propaganda, migration anxiety and religious polarisation have become the new grammar of politics.
Voters now oscillate between welfare and resentment, aspiration and dread — between Bengal’s instinct for coexistence and a demographic panic that is manufactured, bottled and distributed with bureaucratic precision. The panic is artificial. But it works.
What Partition actually did
BENGAL’S Partition in 1947 was not Punjab’s. There was no tidy exchange of bodies to match the new lines on paper: Muslims remained in India; Hindus remained in East Pakistan and later Bangladesh. Rivers, dialects, marriages and market routes refused cartographic finality. Joya Chatterji has spent decades documenting what politicians prefer not to say aloud — that Bengal did not achieve separation so much as an extended, grinding incompleteness, and that the costs were not evenly shared. Upper-caste bhadralok families, with education and contacts, could fold themselves into the state and the city; scheduled caste families, poor rural Hindus, and Bengali Muslims often could not. Many stayed not because history spared them, but because poverty denied them the option of leaving.
I have heard this language before — in places where minorities were first reduced to statistics and then treated as threats. The sequence is reliable: strip people of history, compress them into a demographic category, and violence — legal, institutional, physical — starts to call itself ‘policy.’
The Sri Lankan warning
SOUTH Asia should study Sri Lanka with cold attention. Sinhala Buddhist nationalism was cultivated over decades through narratives of demographic siege; Tamil politics radicalised in parallel. What began as disputes over language and representation militarised step by step until a society consumed itself. Bengal is not there. But the route is familiar and the speed can be shocking.
India’s NRC and CAA debates were not neutral administrative exercises; their effect was to translate demographic anxiety into statecraft. For Bengali Muslims — and for poor Bengali Hindus with no paper trail — they generated existential fear. In societies shaped by famine, displacement and illiteracy, documentation is not a nuisance; it is a class privilege. Making citizenship contingent on paperwork is not rigor. It is a selection mechanism.
Bengal has not yet reached that abyss. But it is moving towards it — and the movement is accelerating.
The BJP’s instrument
THE BJP’s rhetoric of ‘infiltration’ is a deliberately vague weapon: it fuses borders, demography, security, and Islam into a single deployable charge. In West Bengal — a state formed by migration and shaped by displacement — this language carries unusual resonance. Recent campaigns, however, suggest something beyond theatre.
Party leaders have vowed to identify ‘illegal Bangladeshi migrants,’ strip protections and push people ‘back’ across the border. Dhaka once treated this as campaign noise. It is now closer to signalling: language designed to legitimise action.
Bangladesh cannot afford silence. In this context, restraint is not neutrality; it is permission. When Dhaka describes West Bengal as purely India’s ‘internal matter,’ or waits for cross-border ‘movement’ before responding, it abandons vulnerable communities to a politics of intimidation already under way. A neighbour does not wait for expulsions to begin before naming the threat; it sets the boundary in advance — publicly, precisely and at the level of state responsibility.
Dhaka should also resist empty bravado. Sabre-rattling does not protect persecuted people across the border; it furnishes extremists with spectacle. What Bangladesh needs is calibrated, evidence-led wsignalling — and a hard line: any state-enabled persecution, mass intimidation or forced displacement in West Bengal and Assam that is justified through ‘Bangladeshi’ rhetoric will be treated by Dhaka not as campaign talk but as a hostile act with bilateral consequences. Precision, here, is power: name policies, track outcomes, document incitement and hold New Delhi to responsibility.
Bangladesh wants stability. But stability is not achieved by polite ambiguity. It is achieved when boundaries are stated early: minorities are not bargaining chips and rhetoric that licenses harm will be answered in the language of state accountability.
When defeat becomes inadmissible
A SECOND crisis runs alongside the demographic one: the growing inability of parties to treat defeat as normal. Political organisations increasingly operate as communities of affect — bound by grievance and devotion — where losing is read not as feedback but as sabotage. In that climate, allegations around voter-roll deletions and selective enforcement in minority and working-class constituencies become combustible not because institutions resolve them, but because institutions appear absent. Self-critique is replaced by moral certainty; competition is recast as existential injustice; and the democratic capacity to repair legitimacy by admitting error collapses.
The extraction of history
LET us be precise, because precision is the first act of resistance against those who profit from vagueness.
The exhaustion hanging over this delta is not natural. It is induced — engineered with the same deliberateness that élites apply when extracting value from institutions while leaving populations to absorb the costs. The ghosts of Partition have been summoned not to demand justice but to keep a market running. The market is fear. And like all extractive industries, it leaves the ground poorer than it found it.
History in Bengal is no longer permitted to breathe or contradict. A past dense with exchange, coexistence and unresolved complexity is being systematically replaced with a single marketable product: permanent danger. The voter, meanwhile, has been structurally dis-embedded — stripped of ideology, collective purpose, slow solidarity — and left in a marketplace where identity is broken into tradable units, redeemable for welfare, mobilisable through resentment. Religion meets hunger at the polling booth. Trauma is fed, pixel by pixel, into algorithms whose business model depends on the outrage they generate.
This is not governance failure. It is method.
A politics sustained by scapegoating the vulnerable does not stabilise societies — this is not moral assertion, it is empirical record, documented from Colombo to Sarajevo. Power that feeds on manufactured threat corrodes the institutions it claims to protect, until courts become instruments and neighbours learn to speak of one another as liabilities.
Three things follow from the evidence. Demographic panic is a political product with identifiable producers and identifiable beneficiaries — it can be refused. Citizenship cannot be made contingent on paperwork in societies built from displacement and poverty; documentation is a class privilege, and conditioning belonging upon it is not administrative rigour but the criminalisation of the poor. And electoral defeat must remain survivable — when loss becomes existential injustice, politics loses its capacity for self-correction and manufactures enemies as a substitute for introspection.
For Bangladesh, the implication is concrete: silence while Bengali Muslims are framed as an exportable security problem is complicity by omission. Any persecution justified through ‘infiltration’ rhetoric must be named, formally, as a matter of bilateral accountability — now, while the architecture of harm is still readable.
The powerful hold the offices, the checkpoints, the algorithms, the prime-time hours. But the work of preventing history from becoming a weapon — refusing the vocabulary of threat, insisting on the radical ordinariness of coexistence — has never belonged to offices.
It belongs to the communities made to live inside these numbers. And they are still here.
That remains the most inconvenient fact of all.
Abdul Monaiem Kudrot Ullah, a retired captain of the Bangladesh navy, is an informed voice on institutional reform, geo-strategy, strategic governance and supply chain management.
