In India’s tribal-dominated Jharkhand, BJP labels Muslims as ‘Bangladeshis’

Pakur, India – Sitting at a dusty roadside tea stall with his friends in Bada Sanakad village in the tribal-dominated eastern Indian state of Jhakhand, Abdul Gafur is furious.

“Who says we are Bangladeshi infiltrators? Hear me out, we are the registered citizens of India. To date, God knows how many of our generations have passed away on this land. So, do not insult our ancestors by calling us infiltrators,” said the 46-year-old farmer, as nearly a dozen of his companions, most of them Muslims, nodded in agreement.

Gafur is a Muslim, a community in Jharkhand that Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) has been painting as “Bangladeshi infiltrators” for months as it seeks to unseat a coalition of opposition parties, led by Chief Minister Hemant Soren’s Jharkhand Mukti Morcha (JMM), in the two-phase state assembly election that started on November 13.

Bid to break anti-BJP voting bloc?

Bada Sanakad falls in Jharkhand’s Pakur district, which together with Godda, Deoghar, Dumka, Jamtara and Sahibganj districts form what is known as the Santhal Pargana region, which votes in the second phase of the election on Wednesday. The region, with 18 seats in the 81-member state assembly, is dominated by tribal groups, who along with Muslims form about 50 percent of Santhal Pargana’s population and have traditionally been voting for anti-BJP parties.

Across Jharkhand state, the tribes and Muslims – at 26.2 percent and 14.5 percent respectively, according to the 2011 census – form nearly 41 percent of Jharkhand’s 32 million population.

Analysts say it is this pattern of voting among the tribals and Muslims that the BJP aims to break this year by invoking the “Muslim infiltrator” bogey. In 2019, the right-wing party won only four of 18 Santhal Pargana seats, while in the parliamentary elections earlier this year, the BJP failed to win the two seats reserved for the tribals and won one of the three from the region.

Catholic nuns queue up to vote at a polling station during the first phase of Jharkhand election in state capital Ranchi [File: Rajesh Kumar/AP]

India’s affirmative action programme reserves some state assembly and parliamentary seats for historically marginalised groups, including dozens of tribes and less-privileged castes. The programme also extends such quotas in state-run academic institutions and government jobs.

Pakur, located on the northeastern end of Jharkhand, is barely 50km (32 miles) from the Bangladesh border. It also adjoins the Muslim-dominated Murshidabad district in neighbouring West Bengal state. It is for this reason that most residents in Santhal Pargana speak Bengali, a major South Asian language spoken in West Bengal as well as Bangladesh.

The bogey of a Bangladeshi infiltrator is not unfamiliar in India, especially since Modi came to power in 2014 on a Hindu majoritarian agenda. What first started as a demonisation of the mainly-Muslim Rohingya refugees from Myanmar and Bangladesh metamorphosed into a broader campaign against Muslims in India’s northeast, especially in the state of Assam, home to millions of Bengali-speaking Muslims.

In Assam, where a third of its population is Muslim, the BJP and its allies have been running the “Muslim infiltrator” campaign for decades, alleging that Muslims entered the country from Bangladesh “illegally”, altered the state’s demographics, and took over lands and jobs.

Xenophobic campaigns demanding that such Muslims should be deprived of all citizenship rights, jailed or deported to Bangladesh have intensified since a BJP-led coalition first won Assam in 2016. Since then, thousands of Muslims have been declared “doubtful” voters and dozens put in detention centres specifically designed to lock up “illegal” Muslims.

Now, Muslims in Jharkhand fear that politics is being transported to their state: The BJP appointed Assam’s Chief Minister Himanta Biswa Sarma its election coordinator for Jharkhand in the run-up to the vote. Sarma, 55, is a hardline politician accused of hate speeches and policies against Muslims. In several of his election rallies in Jharkhand, Sarma said his party would identify “the illegals” – as he claims he did in Assam – and “push them to Bangladesh”.

Sarma also promised to replicate Assam’s controversial National Register of Citizens (NRC) in Jharkhand if the BJP wins. The NRC, originally ordered by India’s Supreme Court in 2013, aims to identify and deport immigrants in India who do not have valid papers. In 2019, Sarma’s government used the NRC drive to remove nearly two million people from the citizenship list – about half of them Hindus. Though the BJP had declared its intent to implement NRC nationwide, it has been seen using the issue selectively in some regions.

“The country knows that 900,000 Hindus and 700,000 Muslims were left out in the final draft of Assam’s NRC,” Jharkhand-based lawyer Shadab Ansari told Al Jazeera, adding that such campaigns will have no effect in a tribal-dominated state.

Most analysts regard the NRC as a policy supplement to a controversial citizenship law passed by the Modi government in 2019 and implemented earlier this year. The Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA), whose passage had set off protests across the country over allegations of anti-Muslim bias, expedites Indian citizenship for “persecuted” Hindus, Parsis, Sikhs, Buddhists, Jains and Christians from neighbouring Muslim-majority Afghanistan, Bangladesh and Pakistan before December 31, 2014.

BJP spokesman Pratul Shahdev denied the party is using the “Bangladeshi infiltrator” issue as an election plank. “We have been raising this issue for years and will continue to do so,” he told Al Jazeera.

Shahdev said the BJP is not claiming that all Santhal Muslims are infiltrators. “We are only raising questions on Bangladeshi Muslim infiltrators, not on local Muslims of Jharkhand,” he said.

“These infiltrators are taking advantage of various schemes run by the government for minorities by becoming citizens of the country and usurping the rights of local Muslims. They are marrying tribal women and usurping the land of tribals,” he added, without providing any evidence to back his allegation.

Controversial BJP video

Meanwhile, the BJP last week raised its “Bangladeshi infiltrator” pitch by releasing a 53-second video that depicted a group of Muslims, men and children wearing skullcaps and women in burqa, forcibly entering the house of a purported JMM supporter and occupying it.

The video starts with residents in a seemingly upper-middle-class bungalow-style house enjoying their meals and playing music on a radio when the doorbell rings. A man opens the door to find the group outside, some carrying their belongings on their heads.

The man, taken aback, asks what they want. But the group shoves him aside and barges in, taking over the radio and soiling the upholstery with their dirty feet. A woman from the house is shown closing her nose – a stark reference to the invading “impurity”. Soon, the occupants are all over the house, forcing the residents to huddle in a corner. Amid the “occupation”, the camera zooms to a poster featuring JMM’s Soren on the wall. The caption next to his photo says: “We will change the look of Jharkhand.”

Gafur from Pakur told Al Jazeera he saw the video on WhatsApp. “It seems the BJP wants to gain votes by spreading hatred through such videos. This attempt to gain votes by setting a narrative centering on a particular religion is scary,” he said.

The JMM complained to the Election Commission of India about the “misleading and malicious” video, accusing the BJP of breaching the election rules. The commission on Sunday ordered the BJP to take down the video immediately. The party obliged, but the video is still viral on social media, with several accounts on X and Facebook sharing it.

“The only fault of Santhal citizens who are being labelled Bangladeshis is that first, they are Muslims, and two, they are Bengali speaking. That is why they are accused of being Bangladeshis,” JMM legislator Sudivya Kumar Sonu told Al Jazeera.

BJP spokesman Shahdev told Al Jazeera the video “tried to show how horrific the situation is when intruders forcefully enter someone’s house”. “But when the Election Commission instructed, we took it down. We did not post the video to hurt the sentiments of any community,” he said.

‘We can only be patient’

The BJP may have taken down the video, but its top leaders – including Modi’s main aide, Home Minister Amit Shah, and BJP chief Jagat Prakash Nadda – have long been targeting the JMM-led government, accusing it of helping “illegal” Muslims settle across the state and adding them to the voters’ list. In 2018, Shah had repeatedly called Bangladeshi migrants “termites” during his public speeches.

In one of his campaign speeches in Jharkhand, Nadda even cited an alleged intelligence report claiming that “Bangladeshi infiltrators” are sheltered in madrassas (Muslim schools) where they are given key documents reserved for citizens. “The JMM government ensured land for them,” he said.

Gafur rejected the allegation.

“Bangladesh was formed in 1971 whereas all the Muslims living in Bada Sanakad have land records, some going as far back as 1932. Our ancestors have been living here since before the independence of India,” he said.

Wakil Ansari, sitting next to Gafur at the tea stall, agreed. He said the political parties should work to develop the Santhal Pargana region instead of indulging in such polarising tactics.

“Most Santhal families are dependent on agriculture. But due to a lack of resources for irrigation, farmers are dependent on ponds and rain. In such a situation, agriculture has been suffering. The government should work on it,” Ansari, 55, told Al Jazeera.

“Our children are deprived of quality education. Due to limited job opportunities, people either work in stone quarries or migrate to other states in search of better work. No political party is willing to discuss these issues,” he said.

AC Micheal Williams, national coordinator for United Christian Forum, a community group, told Al Jazeera the Hindu right’s politics in Jharkhand so far mainly targeted Christian churches and other such institutions, accusing them of running a conversion campaign by offering cash and other incentives to the poor tribals.

“This year, there have been a total of 585 incidents of violence against Christians across India, with 27 of those incidents occurring in Jharkhand alone,” he noted.

“Just as Christians have been accused of conversion, now Muslims in Jharkhand are being targeted under the pretext of being Bangladeshi infiltrators. Such politically motivated actions for the sake of votes are detrimental to the interests of the country and will ultimately harm social harmony,” he said.

Back at the tea stall in Bada Sanakad village, Gafur only has one thought as he prepares to vote on Wednesday: “We can only be patient.”