NRC pitch in West Bengal

Radhika Ramaseshan
Senior Journalist 

When Durga Puja was celebrated in West Bengal this year, Kolkata’s Kasba locality, home to residents who had endured a stateless life on being forced out of East Bengal (now Bangladesh) after Partition, the pandal used the National Register of Citizens (NRC) as its theme. The mise en scene depicted the struggles waged by people in piecing together their lives, decades later when they might have to ‘prove’ they are card-carrying Indian citizens, failing which they will be stateless and homeless again. A figureless throne, placed at the centre of the stage, fixed on to a globe and outfitted with a crown and guns, symbolised state power and coercion.

Ironically, the NRC shadow loomed over Durga Puja just when the BJP hoped to use the festival as a means of reaching out to its supporters and expand its base. Amit Shah, the Home Minister and BJP president, was invited to inaugurate the community jamboree in several places, although eventually he confined himself to launching one. Identifying and assimilating its world view with the state’s religious and social culture was a considered part of the BJP’s blueprint in West Bengal, that was largely unmapped territory until the 2019 Lok Sabha election breakthrough came about. It was important for the BJP to shake off the tag of a North Indian party confined to Kolkata’s Hindi-speaking Burrabazar.

Initially, under the influence of the core North Indian constituency, the tactic faltered a little. The BJP introduced Ram Navami as a pan-Indian festival in West Bengal but that left no imprint on a region that embraced eclectic forms of Hinduism implanted in the lives and teachings of Chaitanya Mahaprabhu and Ramakrishna Paramhans. Modi and Shah figured out that it was important to connect with provincial symbols and icons to enlarge the BJP’s reach. Therefore, the Union Culture Ministry was directed to mount a permanent exhibit at Kolkata’s National Library, representing Bankim Chandra Chattopadhyay, Tagore, Syama Prasad Mukherjee and Subhas Chandra Bose. On the ground, the endeavour to propagate Ram and Hanuman as ‘nationalist’ icons continued with vigour, so that when it was time for the Lok Sabha polls, large sections of even Bengali-speaking Hindus, who traditionally worshipped Durga, Kali and Saraswati, adopted these gods in their iconography. The BJP took care to fuse the religious with the political: Ram was venerated as an image of desh bhakti, of nationalism because in the party’s reckoning, West Bengal had to transcend its identity politics and fuse into the ‘national mainstream’.

The NRC fiasco in Assam threatened to obstruct the BJP’s long-term plans. Rather than proceed along the contours it laid out for decades — segregating the ‘infiltrators’ from the ‘refugees’ of Bangladesh and underscoring their religious identities while harping on how the Hindus were ‘driven out’ in droves from across the eastern border — the Assam exercise left out a large number of Bengali-speaking Hindus from the final NRC. Almost as many as the Muslims. The BJP wanted to deport the Muslim ‘infiltrators’ and grant citizenship rights to the ‘refugees’ unlike its periodic ally, the Asom Gana Parishad, that refused to recognise such a distinction. What happened to the BJP’s age-old belief?

The spectre of a homegrown crisis, akin to the predicament of Myanmar’s Rohingya, haunted the hunted of Assam and possibly, West Bengal, Muslims and Hindus. The amended law required that both parents of those born on or after December 4, 2004, must be Indian citizens. The amendment overturned the principle of jus soli adopted by the Motilal Nehru Committee in 1928 to confer citizenship based on one’s birthplace. The concept of jus sanguinis, or right of blood, that governed the amendment, stipulated that an ‘unlawful’ migrant cannot claim citizenship by naturalisation or registration, even if he or she resided in India for the required seven years.

As Shah vowed to bring NRC in West Bengal, CM Mamata Banerjee claimed that Assam would not be repeated in her state. Her rationale was that the NRC project in Assam was an outcome of the accord signed in 1985 between the Centre and the spearheads of the All Assam Students Union while West Bengal was not dictated to by any such pact. With the emergence of the BJP as her principal opponent and herself fire-fighting allegations of corruption and bad law and order in her backyard, Mamata seized upon NRC threat as an anti-Bengali issue and alleged that it was a ploy to evict Bengali-speaking residents of Assam and jeopardise the people of her state. Implicit in her argument was the point that by ‘targeting’ Bengalis, the BJP was going back to its northern roots. Indeed, BJP insiders in West Bengal were afraid that NRC might overshadow the other issues they had raised against Mamata. 

The electoral implications of Shah’s pitch were not lost on the West Bengal BJP. Even if the party was unconcerned about the votes of the minorities, it had other ethnic groups to worry about. In 2019, the BJP had won over the Matua, the second largest Dalit grouping, by wooing its influencers. The Matua were originally from Bangladesh. Some came to West Bengal immediately after Partition while others after 1971. The Matua votes count in nearly 40 of the 295 Assembly seats. The Matua settlers also feared their future. 

To assuage the apprehensions, Shah — who rarely, if ever, diluted his stances — repeatedly stated that Hindus had no reason to be afraid because the Centre would reintroduce the Citizenship Amendment (2014) Bill and ensure its passage. If that is accomplished, the minorities (Hindu, Sikh, Buddhist, Jain and Christian) who migrated unlawfully from Bangladesh, Pakistan and Afghanistan can continue living here.

NRC does not reverberate only in the districts bordering Bangladesh. After nearly one lakh persons from the Gorkha ethnic group were dropped from Assam’s citizenship register, West Bengal’s Gorkhas feared a similar fate. In the end, NRC was less about faith and more about the loss of human dignity and keeping body and soul together.