Hindu Nationalism's Tryst with 'Infiltration' Enables the Cultural Otherisation of Muslims

Prime Minister Narendra Modi's address on Independence Day introduced its citizens to a new set of challenges and fears. One of them was the ominous crisis faced by the country through the cataclysmic influx of infiltration, requiring an urgent warfare policy. Modi claimed that the infiltrators are eating up the resources of people, forcefully marrying girls, capturing land and aggressively fostering population imbalance.

His mention indicted infiltrators responsible for all the sociopolitical ills India is plagued with: simmering inequality, high unemployment, and grave poverty, with rising communal flare-ups in the nation.

Since then, Modi has been involved in leading a campaign for the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) for the upcoming state elections. On August 22, he participated in two strategically crucial rallies in Bihar and West Bengal. He persistently invoked the issue of infiltration and pervading cultural erosion as a severe crisis in both states. Exhorting that the infiltrators dreadfully threaten national security and the regions' demographic and cultural landscape, he appealed for popular mobilisation against the opposition parties whose pseudosecular affinities have harboured this illegal population.

In his Brigade Cholo Rally in Kolkata, he spoke about resource plunder and the looting of jobs done by the infiltrators, as well as the posing of a threat to the women. From New Delhi to Gaya and Kolkata, Modi mentioned the need for the nationalist BJP to have state power to safeguard the natives from the infiltrating outsiders. Recently, BJP leaders like Union home mnister Amit Shah and Assam Chief Minister Himanta Biswa Sharma have joined the chorus with their polarising remarks on infiltration.

Jan-Werner Müller, a theorist of Populism, has underscored the pressing need to manufacture new forms of fear and innovatively formulate new definitional contours of the other against which the real people are symbolically constructed, whom the populists tend to represent. Based on exclusionary identity politics and moral monopoly over representing the people, Hindutva politics has taken this innovative turn to produce demographic fearmongering and fear of the other to consolidate Hindus in these election-bound states.

The outsider within and the infiltrated outsider

Modi’s ludicrous claims about infiltration overlook key questions associated with it. While alleging the recent rise in infiltration, to much of amazement, Modi did not question the Home Ministry and security establishments, handled by his counterparts like Shah and Union defence minister Rajnath Singh, who should have been answerable for their dereliction of duty. Additionally, security agencies have rarely provided strong evidence, systematic answers or actual numbers about infiltration, making the case even more sceptical and questionable.

However, beyond these actual considerations, it is understandable that the impetus of infiltration has ideological underpinnings rather than security urgencies. Under Hindutva framing, this perceivable infiltrator remains fixed. It is the perpetual figure of a Muslim, whose existence in the body politics of India is logically premised as non-native/non-resident, who has gotten a forceful entry into the Hindu land through invasion and plunder.

Recent iterations of this suspicious infiltration took place in Delhi NCR, where Bengali Muslims, doing menial jobs of garbage collection and wage labour, were hounded, targeted and detained by the police on suspicion of being Bangladeshi. The rumours initially devised by Hindutva politics received institutional legitimacy from the police over time, who conducted concerted raids on slum areas designated as hubs of infiltrated Bangladeshi Muslims. Facing the wrath of such arbitrary police actions, many of them fled back to their hometown.

The case of infiltration, however, is an established motif invoked by Hindutva politics to promote security anxieties and cultural loss, as well as mobilise electorates. Narratives of infiltration are weaponised to disenfranchise minorities in states like Assam, which has a complex history of migration.

Overlooking standard procedures, citizens with documented proof of ancestry to the land are detained and forcefully deported to Bangladesh. Adding to the same, Hemanta Biswa Sharma’s government has been fuelling ethnic rifts in Assam amongst the indigenous communities and the minorities. Recently, Sharma’s government announced a contentious plan to provide arms licences to the indigenous community to fight against outsiders, resist demographic challenges and safeguard their resources.

It is by deploying the bogey of infiltration that Hindutva politics explicitly limits the mobility of Muslims and converts it into a suspicious identity. They become extremely docile recipients of unchecked state violence. Their religious identity becomes unassertive, worth concealing at best, as it can welcome state repression anytime. The terrain for asserting citizen rights gets eroded to the point that they experience disenfranchisement.

The narrative of infiltration emboldens Hindutva politics to define the outsider within, the member citizens of the country, who can be sketched as the infiltrated outsider. Arjun Appadurai, a renowned anthropologist, explained this process as the transformation of majority identity into Predatory Identity. Under Hindutva politics, the identity of Hindus has increasingly turned predatory, whose social construction and mobilisation requires the collective annihilation of other minority identities.

The narrative of ceaseless population explosion by minorities is encoded with the fear of trading places between majority and minority that the predatory identity puts forward. Predatory identity also operates with a sense of incompleteness of national body purity, achievable only by eliminating the other. The rhetoric of an infiltrated other is yet another attempt from Hindutva politics to formulate a predatory Hindu identity.

The mainstreaming of RSS logic by the BJP

After tasting political success in bordering states, similar rhetoric of infiltration and demographic fearmongering became the BJP’s central poll plank in the 2024 state elections in Jharkhand. Having failed to win any tribal dominated seats in the 2024 general elections, the BJP shifted its stance against Muslims. Modi himself declared the need to protect Roti, Beti, and Maati (women, land and livelihood) from the infiltrators.

The Hindutva campaign epicentred on Muslim infiltration, caricaturing them as an unwanted and illegal presence in the state and acting as agents of a Jihadi project to upturn the demography and become dominant. Ironically, Such demographic fearmongering was rejected by the Union Home Ministry. Intended to foment a communal rift between Adivasis and the Muslims and mobilise the former towards the BJP, such divisive rhetoric was deployed to spawn doubts about the illegitimate propulsion of the Muslim population, particularly in tribal dominated region of Santhal Pargana.

The infiltration plank in Jharkhand elections, however, was sourced from the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), whose affiliate organisations have a long history of active pursuit. I get reminded of an interesting exchange with a senior RSS Adivasi activist from Jharkhand at the Mahakumbh Mela in 2025. He told me about how the campaign around infiltration was designed in Jharkhand with the suggestion of the RSS.

Even after the electoral loss in Jharkhand and failure to secure the tribal votes, he found this plank not lacking any efficacy; instead, it had strong emotive appeals amongst tribals for their cultural and demographic loss. He insisted on other factors becoming overwhelmingly determinative in vote choices, but if provided a further push, this narrative will provide a long-term electoral dividend for the BJP.

Giving examples of bordering states like Assam and Odisha, he said the issue of infiltration is generative of cultural unity in the Hindu community and political inclination towards the BJP. Hence, as per him, the BJP has only mainstreamed this narrative even after the electoral loss. The plausible explanation for this discursive expansion of infiltration in regions like Bihar reminds us of the centrality of RSS in yielding electoral planks for the BJP.

A broader spectrum of the population is being redefined as political outsiders through categorical reconfiguration as infiltrators, affirming the existing logic of cultural outsiders. The cultivation of Muslims as the violent and cultural other, who have infiltrated, has been the stated historical explanation for their existence in the nation-space of India for a long time.

The logic is officiated and instituted through Modi’s Independence Day speech. As historian Gyanendra Pandey argues, the Hindu Nationalist history of India is a repeated tale of Muslim aggression and Hindu defence. With the coming of Muslims and perpetual religious conflicts, the identity of native and foreigner got permanently fixed as Hindu and Muslim, respectively.

Doubtful, problematic yet protected

From Hemant Soren in Jharkhand, Mamata Banerjee in West Bengal, to the Tejashwi Yadav-led alliance in Bihar, opposition-led governments and alliances are attacked for safeguarding and protecting the infiltrators. From Rohingyas to Bangladeshis, Hindu right utilises distinctive forms of cultural identification for Muslims. This makes Hindutva politics fit itself as the protector of real Hindus against the Muslim other and defender of the territorial and cultural integrity, as territorial integrity is fused with religious purity.

Team Modi fashions itself as an uncompromising and firm follower of the constitutional rulebook, which takes stringent measures against outsiders while being inconsiderate of vote-bank politics and pseudosecular pressures. On the other hand, the opposition parties are found liable to protect the doubtful, problematic and culturally alien identities and henceforth doing a disservice to the nation.

Though Infiltration is deployed as an administrative category with secular underpinnings, in its bureaucratic operationalisation, it borrows the perceptual clarity from the Hindu Nationalist understanding of infiltration and directs punitive actions against Muslims. This converts the whole community composed of a doubtful set of individuals, vulnerable to an arbitrary state targeting. They become expendable in the bodypolitics.

It is the aversion to imagine and treat Muslims as fellow citizens that compels Hindutva politics to refer to Muslims as "termites", "infiltrators" and "illegal outsiders". Hindutva functions through the notion of an irredeemable otherness in relation to Muslims.  The notion of infiltration and illegal outsider offers a synthesis of Hindutva cultural otherisation of Muslims and concomitant production of punitive state action, repressive policies and disenfranchisement. The bogey of Infiltration adds to the physical and discursive creation of the other in the repertoire of Hindutva.

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