‘Bangladeshi, Bangladeshi’: A Political Version of the Boy Who Cried Wolf

Let me start by narrating a joke that is doing the rounds: Two Delhi Police constables are heard lamenting, ‘Look, we even sing our national anthem Jana Gana Mana in Bangladeshi’. I pray it remains a joke. Otherwise, the way politics is being played in India in the name of ghuspaithiya (literally infiltrators, hinting at the undocumented Bangladeshis), it may not be long before many Indians will actually start believing such nonsense.

Most fables are real-life experiences reimagined into stories for greater appeal. The bogey of ‘ghuspaithiya’, BJP's hobby horse, fits the model perfectly. So much so that it even figured prominently in Prime Minister Narendra Modi's Independence Day speech, and again later in his Gaya (Bihar) rally, where he specifically tried to counter Rahul Gandhi’s growing popularity in the state, if not in the nation at large.

Modi’s record-breaking 103-minute Independence Day speech talked about how these ghuspaithiya were stealing away India's jobs, grabbing the lands of poor adivasis, and most importantly, threatening India's security. Echoing the age-old RSS apprehension about demographic changes in India in favour of the Muslims, the prime minister promised the creation of a high-powered 'demography mission' to root out the problem and ‘make India safe again’ (not Modi’s words, but had I been his speech writer, I would have inserted this phrase to rhyme with Donald Trump’s ‘Make America Great Again’).

There is nothing new in these allegations and BJP's poll planks have routinely highlighted them.  But in so far as hard data is concerned about exactly how many such infiltrators have been nabbed by the security forces, and how many have actually been deported to Bangladesh – the figures are hardly frightening. Moreover, it is often reported in the press that because of mistaken identity or sloppy procedures many such infiltrators are eventually repatriated to India.

Supreme Court advocate Mehmood Pracha taunts that for all the years that Modi is in power, Sheikh Hasina was the matriarch of Bangladesh, and the two enjoyed a good equation. That being the case, she must have been a conduit in these illegal entries. But the irony is that this biggest of culprits are now being given political asylum in India in the face of growing demands in Bangladesh for her repatriation. Doesn't it take all the wind off Modi's ghuspaithiya sail, jibes Pracha. Adding salt and pepper to the story, the present Bangladesh government has complained to India that many pro-Awami League Bangladeshis are active in Kolkata, from where they are plotting her return to power.  India's external affairs ministry has, of course, denied the allegation.

It is an elementary demographic theory that just like water seeks its level, poorer people migrate to richer economies, particularly if both are democratic and contiguous. No power on earth has been able to prevent this process. The experience of the United States highlights the reality. If America, which is separated by thousands of miles of water, cannot root out the 'menace' of illegal migrants from South Asia or Southeast Asia, it is foolhardy to think that India can eliminate the phenomenon.

It is nobody’s case that unauthorised settlers should have a field day nor should its security consequences be ignored. However, one has to be serious and circumspect. It cannot be just during election rallies that politicians play to the gallery by raising the problem, only to return to ‘no action’ afterwards.

In the process, the game has become counter-productive.  One of the prime reasons for Sheikh Hasina’s ouster was her bonhomie with the Modi regime, whose anti-Muslim politics was being closely watched in Bangladesh with alarm and revulsion. After all, we should not forget that India and Bangladesh are like reverse Siamese twins – India’s Hindu-Muslim ratio is 80:15 and Bangladesh’s Muslim-Hindu ratio is 90:10.

Anti-Muslim rhetoric has become BJP’s bread and butter. It was also evident in the latest conduct of the Special Intensive Revision (SIR) of the electoral rolls in Bihar. A detailed ground report published in Caravan (August 2025) demonstrates that the entire exercise was sloppily executed. 

Worse still, the report leaves no doubt that BJP was overly sensitive to the danger posed by the ghuspaithiya which had every potential to prejudice the enumerators (BLOs, Block Level Officers) to be unsympathetic to Muslim voters. BJP national spokesperson Sudhanshu Trivedi accused the SIR critics for robbing the ‘Indian democracy on the back of foreign infiltrators’. 

In districts with large Muslim populations, such as Araria, Katihar, Kishanganj and Purnea, the party's agenda was to scare the Muslim voters so as to create an atmosphere that would discourage the enumerators to include them in the voters' list. It may be noted that these districts have the biggest number of un-submitted enumeration forms which suggests that any purge of electoral rolls would harm their interest the most. 

Now that the Election Commission has made the elimination data of 6.5 million people in Bihar public, it would be instructive to see how much of this fear is true. Initial press reports suggested there are hardly any sizable excluded people on the grounds of being undocumented Bangladeshis.

The noise raised by the SIR controversy in Bihar, generated by both ground reports and by rumours, have begun stirring the marginal communities in West Bengal, which will soon experience the same SIR exercise. Particularly worried are the Matuas, who constitute the second largest scheduled caste community in the state, after the Namasudras. Their strategic voting has played a significant role in a number of West Bengal constituencies in the past.

The most interesting part of the story is that they are queuing up in thousands to get a Matua card, or a Hindu card (issued by community leaders, mainly two brothers, one is BJP, a minister in Modi’s cabinet, while the other is a TMC sympathiser). They probably think it offers a greater guarantee of voter enrollment, not the documents prescribed by the Election Commission.  

Only the politically naive would not smell a communal rat in the story. Given her political base among Bengali Muslims, West Bengal chief minister Mamata Banerjee has every reason to watch the SIR activities in Bihar very closely, and understandably with alarm.

Bangali, Bengali, Bangladeshi!

There is yet another dimension to the ghuspaithiya story, which revolves round the Bengali versus Bangladeshi controversy. The issue has linguistic, ethnic and communal overtones, as is also reflected in the joke at the beginning of this article. BJP IT cell chief Amit Malviya added fuel to the fire by arguing that Bengali as such is not a language, but merely an ethnicity marker.  

There is some logic in his argument. The Bengalis are indeed an ethnicity, but the English word for Bangla is also Bengali, just like the English word for Deutsch is German. This is to say, a word can connote both a people and a language.

The controversy has an interesting political history in Bangladesh. In the aftermath of the assassination of the Awami League leader Sheikh Mujibur Rahman in August 1975, power shifted eventually to the Bangladesh Nationalist Party (BNP), which coined the word 'Bangladeshi nationalism' to counter the hegemony of Awami League’s 'Bengali nationalism’.  

While the latter stood to represent the Bengali-speaking people of Bangladesh, which was self-consciously secular in conception. 'Bangladeshi nationalism', in contrast, emphasized territoriality and religion, i.e. Bangladesh and Islam. Ziaur Rahman popularised the slogan ‘Bangladesh Zindabad’ to replace the Awami League’s ‘Joy Bangla’ so as to make the distinction clear.

Now that the BNP are once again ascendant, Joy Bangla will be increasingly inaudible, if not condemned to oblivion altogether. In the process, West Bengal may as well be seen as alien.  In realpolitik, however, this distinction is difficult to identify for the middle-rung politicians often switch their loyalties from one to the other. In theoretical literature, however, this distinction has been recognised and subjected to scholarly scrutiny.

Postscript 

I recall watching a 1970s Hollywood flick in which a pregnant Mexican woman is seeking to somehow stay in America to eventually become an American citizen. Although initially successful in evading US immigration authorities, she is eventually nabbed and set to be deported. Just as she is being pushed into Mexico, but while she is still on US soil, she delivers the baby. The movie ends with the woman sporting a huge grin: her new-born is a US national, something she will never become.

An exactly opposite story was reported in the Indian Express on August 19, 2025.  An eight-month pregnant Indian Muslim woman was erroneously deported to Bangladesh on the allegation that she is Bangladeshi. Her family is now running from pillar to post to bring her back to India as soon as possible. For, in case she delivers her baby on Bangladeshi soil, it will be a herculean task for her and her family to ensure that the baby becomes an Indian national.

Partha S. Ghosh is a retired professor, JNU.

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