Cooch Behar: Cooch Behar’s famed Rash Mela is usually a riot of colour and devotion, a place where people from across North Bengal and neighbouring Assam gather for trade, worship and entertainment.

This year, the giant ferries wheel and the loudspeakers blaring Zubeen Garg’s songs had a persistent competitor. The usual crowds seeking food and fancy items gave way to people clustering around the Special Intensive Revision (SIR) help centres, lining up at busy photocopy counters, and listening anxiously as local leaders warned that, “names (might be) left out”.

What appears to be a routine bureaucratic exercise has struck at the heart of one of North Bengal’s most important communities, the Rajbanshis, already burdened by land loss, demographic decline and an unresolved struggle for dignity and autonomy.

Cooch Behar, tucked into the northern edge of West Bengal and sharing a long border with Assam, is often more shaken by political winds blowing from Guwahati than by decisions taken in Kolkata. The memory of National Register of Citizens (NRC) lists and detention camps in the neighbouring state travels across the border through kinship and migration and today it feeds a quiet panic.

“The BJP has created an atmosphere of fear. They campaign about what is happening in neighbouring Assam, about detention camps and so on, and are spreading fear among Rajbanshi people,” claims senior Trinamool Congress (TMC) leader and the chairman of Cooch Behar municipality, Rabindranath Ghosh.

The fear is not abstract.

Earlier this year, Cooch Behar resident Uttam Kumar Brajabashi, a Rajbanshi, received a notice from the Assam government branding him an “illegal immigrant” who had supposedly entered India from Bangladesh between 1966 and 1971. The notice asked him to prove his citizenship before a foreigner’s tribunal or face deportation. Brajabashi was born in 1975.

A large share of those whose names were excluded in several Assamese districts are reported to be from Rajbanshi communities, including elected representatives, and this has intensified fear in Cooch Behar and other Rajbanshi pockets as the Election Commission has undertaken the SIR of electoral rolls. The enumeration phase will continue till December 11 and the final rolls will be published on February 14, according to the poll body.

“I was born in a village in Assam and later shifted to Cooch Behar. Many of us still have relatives there. Everyone is quietly tense,” says Dinen Roy, a trader from Bhetaguri.

In Rash Mela ground and small bazaars alike, photocopy kiosks are witnessing brisk business.

“People are taking photos for SIR forms and making multiple xerox copies of Aadhaar, voter ID and ration cards,” explains Deepak Barman, a young Rajbanshi running one such shop.

Almost every family has male members working outside West Bengal as migrant labourer. They fear their names may vanish from records if they cannot return in time.
Behind this fear lies a complex social and historical context. Rajbanshis are the largest single Scheduled Caste group in West Bengal, but they constitute only about 4.17% of the state population and roughly 17 to 18% of the Scheduled Caste population according to the 2011 census. They are heavily concentrated in North Bengal and nearly two thirds of all Rajbanshis live in Cooch Behar, Jalpaiguri and Uttar Dinajpur. Historically they are among the earliest settled communities of the region, linked to the Koch royal lineage and the former princely state of Cooch Behar, and their native tongue is Rajbanshi or Kamtapuri. Yet even in their heartland, Rajbanshis feel they are shrinking.

In Cooch Behar, they constitute roughly 38% of the district’s population, and in Jalpaiguri, around 24%. Yet, across successive censuses from 1951 to 2011, the proportion of Rajbanshis in these key districts has steadily dropped, Ayan Guha pointed out in his book 'The Curious Trajectory of Caste in West Bengal Politics'.

Once a Congress and Left stronghold, the Rajbanshi belt swung sharply towards the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) in the 2019 Lok Sabha elections, when the party swept seven of the eight North Bengal seats, including Cooch Behar, on the back of heavy Rajbanshi support. Since then, both the BJP and TMC have treated Rajbanshis as a decisive “swing block” in around half of the 54 assembly constituencies in North Bengal, making them central to any serious bid for power in the region.

The BJP has tried to consolidate that support symbolically and organisationally, for instance by elevating Rajbanshi leader Ananta Maharaj to the Rajya Sabha and engaging with statehood demands such as Greater Cooch Behar and Kamtapur, even if it has never officially committed to redrawing state boundaries.

On the SIR question, Maharaj strikes a different note from the party. “Many people do not have proper documents, so many names may be left out [of the SIR process],” he admits.

The fear has intensified in recent months as a fresh spell of natural disasters has destroyed many homes in North Bengal, wiping out land deeds, voter identity cards and other crucial documents that poor Rajbanshi families need to prove their citizenship.

“In the last few years, floods and natural disasters have devastated many poor people,” says Ananta Roy, district secretary of the Communist Party of India (Marxist) (CPI(M)) in Cooch Behar and himself a Rajbanshi. “Their houses and documents were washed away. Now the RSS and BJP are spreading fear, saying that so called illegal voters or those without papers will be punished or sent to Bangladesh or detention camps.”

In Sitai, Mohammad Shafique Sekh, who identifies his family as Rajbanshi Nasya Sheikh (Rajbanshi Muslim), describes the practical dilemma.

“There is no dispute about us being permanent residents. Now the problem is that when submitting the SIR form, you have to show the original Aadhaar and voter cards to the BLO,” he explains. “During the recent disaster all our family documents were destroyed. So there is anxiety.”

As Rash Mela’s lights fade and SIR stalls close for the night, a quiet question hangs over Cooch Behar and the wider Rajbanshi belt. In a region they have inhabited for generations, will the paperwork of the state still recognise them as belonging here?

Translated from Bangla by Aparna Bhattacharya. 

This article went live on December third, two thousand twenty five, at zero minutes past ten in the morning.

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