With the BJP’s story about illegal Bangladeshi immigrants, a state with a strong Leftist identity that had mostly avoided talking about Hindus and Muslims in the election story could no longer do so.
A gripping story is needed to turn a mostly red state into a mostly yellow one, almost like a colour change at the polls. The Left Front may have lost power to Mamata Banerjee’s Trinamool Congress in 2011 after 34 years, but West Bengal stayed mostly on the Left even under Banerjee.
People in the state often called the Trinamool Congress’s politics “Left of Left” because they strongly supported “wide-net welfare” and had a history of being against big business (the Singur agitation of 2006–2008 against Tatas and not being able to bring in a lot of new business when they were in power).
All of this helps to explain why the results of the Assembly elections on May 4 have shocked so many people who follow Bengal. Bangladesh, which is nearby, was a major reason for the BJP’s clear victory.
It could be the way Bangladeshi Hindus were treated after Sheikh Hasina’s government fell, the way the Matua community, which has roots in modern day Bangladesh, votes together or the fear that illegal Bangladeshi immigrants will change the state’s population.
Hindutva’s rise and Hasina’s fall
Outside of the Bangladesh Deputy High Commission in Kolkata in December 2025, there was a big protest led by Hindu monks and Hindutva groups. They wanted justice for Dipu Chandra Das, a Hindu textile worker who had been murdered and set on fire by a mob in the nearby country earlier that month. Das’ death was a one time event. Attempted attacks on Hindus in Bangladesh got a lot of attention around the world and made things more heated in West Bengal.
As word spread that Das had been killed, protesters tried to break through the barriers, which led to heated arguments, scuffles and eventually physical fights with the police outside of the Bangladesh Deputy High Commission in Kolkata.
The irony couldn’t have been more clear to Aroon Shah, who is state vice president of the BJP’s youth group, the Bharatiya Janata Yuva Morcha. Think about monks dressed in red being beaten up in public in the middle of Kolkata for protesting the death of Dipu Chandra Das because they were Hindu.
The head of the opposition party Suvendu Adhikari met with top officials at the Bangladesh Deputy High Commission right away with a group of five people to demand that the terrible crimes happening to Hindus in Bangladesh stop. He was also very angry at the Mamata Banerjee government for how the cops treated Hindu protesters.
A big part of the BJP’s story since then has been that after the fall of the Sheikh Hasina government on August 5, 2024, Hindus were in danger in Bangladesh, but Muslims could sneak into India through the porous border and fill out the voter rolls, giving Banerjee a clear electoral edge.
The Hindu Muslim split had been mostly left out of the election story for a long time in a state that leans left, but it could no longer do that.
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What Matua means
The Matuas are a highly important Bengali Scheduled Caste group founded by Harichand Thakur in East Bengal, now Bangladesh, in the 1800s. They have a say in a number of important West Bengal electoral districts. The BJP worked hard to get the Matuas to vote for them, but it was thought that their high rate of deletions under the SIR turned this group of voters against the ruling party.
A British Academy International Fellow at the University of Sussex’s Department of Anthropology, Ayan Guha, told ThePrint that it is true that many Matuas have been removed from the voter rolls because of SIR, but it looks like they have decided to vote for the BJP this time. Guha thinks that Bangladesh is the reason.
Even though being left out has caused stress and anger, it is clear that the BJP is still their first choice. It’s clear that the widespread violence and horrible crimes against Hindus in Bangladesh after Hasina have caused them to vote as Hindu refugees, Guha said.
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Guha refers to this as the politics of memory
The situation in Bangladesh has given a boost to the BJP’s ‘politics of memory,’ which relies on bringing up the memory of the religious victimisation faced by the Matua Namasudras in East Pakistan/Bangladesh in order to mobilise them not as a lower caste group but as a persecuted group of Hindu refugees, he said.
Guha said he was surprised to learn from people he works with in Matua-heavy constituencies that even people whose names or the names of family members were deleted from the SIR actively participated in the BJP’s election campaign in the hopes that the party’s pro Hindu stance would keep its promise to give them citizenship status and the right to vote.
In Bengal, where people are mostly different, the Hindu-Muslim political divide has not worked as well as it has in other places. But events in Bangladesh have changed Bengal’s politics in a big way and given the BJP a chance to win power.
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