The BJP’s singular fixation might just be its undoing

On the last two-and-a-half days of 2025, Union home minister Amit Shah camped in a hotel in Kolkata. He made it clear that he was in charge of the party’s election campaign in the state and talked up a storm over his pet ghuspaithiyas (infiltrators). His message to party leaders and workers was sharp and clear.

The BJP must win the urban seats in Bengal and Hindus must be told what a civilizational and existential threat Muslim infiltrators are to them and to the state. He delivered an equally ‘simple’ message to voters: trust the BJP with power and watch the transformation of the state. His message to Hindu infiltrators from Bangladesh was this: give the BJP your votes and we will ensure your citizenship. To discerning observers, two things became clear.

First, Shah failed to grasp the relative size and significance of Hindu ghuspaithiyas compared to the Hindu majority that existed in West Bengal even before Partition. Second, the BJP was rattled by the splits and doubts among the Matuas, till recently a secure vote bank for the party. Ghuspaithiya Hindu voters are smarter than Shah thinks.

Their question to the BJP is: “What is the guarantee that we will be recognised as refugees fleeing religious persecution in Bangladesh, and not considered infiltrators?” Mamata Banerjee has been consistent in saying that no eligible voters will be allowed to be disenfranchised. Despite the BJP having organised camps in the districts they have settled in, returning migrants, refugees and Matuas served notices by EROs or called for hearings by Election Commission officials are stopping off at the local Trinamool Congress offices, not BJP party offices, to figure out what they should do.

This has not gone unnoticed. Seen from the perspective of refugees who arrived illegally or even legitimate citizens, Shah’s pronouncements on the purification of the body politic are scary. They suggest a programme designed to destabilise the communal and social equilibrium of West Bengal. Shah’s assurances sound like empty rhetoric designed merely to inveigle voters to close the gap between the Trinamool Congress’s 48 per cent vote share and the BJP’s 38.7 per cent.

The trade-off between votes and security underpins the BJP’s appeal. The BJP has failed to proactively address the concerns of individual voters struggling with the SIR process. The Trinamool Congress has scored big on this, through its own intensive support system to troubled voters on one hand, and its high visibility and volatile confrontations with the Election Commission on the other.

Trinamool general secretary Abhishek Banerjee, after meeting the CEC and other two election commissioners, accused Gyanesh Kumar of being rude, aggressive and pointing fingers at him. The CEC, he alleged, often lost his cool, and dared the Election Commission to release the video footage of the meeting. On its own part, the Election Commission has made no secret of its distrust of state government officials and the ruling party in the state.

Meanwhile, a mishmash narrative on the theme of ghuspaithiya/demographic change/civilisational threat all rolled into one is fast snowballing into dangerous doctrine. This was evident in rowdy rallies outside Bangladesh’s diplomatic offices in Kolkata, where smaller groups of BJP volunteers were bolstered by RSS affiliates such as the Bangiyo Hindu Jagaran Manch. Shah acolyte Suvendu Adhikari even demanded that India do an Israel on Gaza and launch an Operation Sindoor-style blitz on Bangladesh.

The BJP’s narrative thus rests on the enemies within and the enemies without. In its retelling of the ‘Hindus in danger’ trope, a politically unstable Bangladesh is recast as an enemy State, where violence against individual Hindus who are Bangladeshi citizens is invoked to justify violence against the State itself.

The BJP is hamstrung by its central leadership’s ownership of and political position on the SIR process; and its singular obsession with infiltrators. Its centrally scripted campaigns with hybrid hashtags like ‘2026SeBJPAsche’ invite ridicule, with Bengalis pointing out that correct Bangla would have been ‘2026-e-BJP-Aasche’. Amit Shah’s silence on the targeting of Bengali Muslims elsewhere in India as ‘Bangladeshis’ isn’t helping either.