The Delhi High Court has stayed proceedings in a criminal defamation case filed against Sudarshan TV and its editor Suresh Chavhanke in connection with allegations that his channel made false accusations against a madrasa. The case against Chavhanke was filed by Mohammed Tufail Khan
China said on Sunday (August 23, 2026) it was postponing its planned ambitious Chang'e-7 lunar mission, which was set to carry out explorations including searching for water ice on the moon. The Chang'e-7 spacecraft was originally set to lift off in the coming days from the Wenchang Space Launch
Canada’s Carney Puts His ‘No Deal Is Better Than a Bad Deal’ Doctrine to the Test The prime minister ’s approach has broad support from the Canadian public and his political opponents, but it isn’t without risks. Published on: Aug 24, 2026, 14:05:27 IST WSJ Prefer HTon Google Share via
A group of former cricket captains, including Indian batting legend Sunil Gavaskar and one of England's longest-serving skippers Sir Alastair Cook, have called on Pakistan to ensure its ex-PM Imran Khan be given proper care while in custody. The cricketer-turned-politician has been in jail since
Fewer than 20 commodity vessels transited the Strait of Hormuz at the weekend, shipping data showed on Monday (August 24, 2026), as Iranian and U.S. blockades restrict traffic through the chokepoint for energy shipments. Four vessels crossed the strait on Sunday (August 23, 2026)
How the BJP played the Bangladesh card during the Bengal poll campaign
West Bengal 2026 will be remembered not just as the election in which the Bharatiya Janata Party displaced the Trinamool Congress after 15 years in the saddle, but also as the moment when a long-standing border question acquired a new electoral intensity, making Bangladesh central to the state’s internal political rhetoric.
The verdict is decisive. The Election Commission of India’s results for 293 of 294 seats show the BJP at 207 and the Trinamool at 80, even as Falta constituency is still pending because a repoll has been ordered.
This scale of victory cannot be explained by one factor alone. The Trinamool faced an anti-incumbency sentiment, as well as allegations of corruption against its leaders and claims that women were unsafe under its watch.
In addition, the BJP had a formidable organisation machine.
These scattered variables were given ideological coherence by the Bangladesh factor. It converted discontent into civilisational security.
Bangladesh functioned as a mirror in which West Bengal was invited to view itself: Hindu or Muslim, refugee or infiltrator, borderland or nation, Bengali or anti-national. This was the BJP’s most consequential achievement. It made Bangladesh the grammar with which citizenship, demography, welfare and loyalty were read.
This was possible because Bangladesh’s political story changed dramatically after Sheikh Hasina’s ouster in August 2024. The interim dispensation under Muhammad Yunus inherited a crisis of legitimacy, reform and law and order. Human Rights Watch noted that after mass protests forced Hasina to resign and flee, there were attacks on shops, homes and places of worship belonging to political opponents and minorities.
This year, Human Rights Watch was still reporting mob violence and pressure from hardline groups. India’s Ministry of External Affairs repeatedly expressed concerns about attacks on Hindus and other minorities in Bangladesh. Whether every account circulating in Bengal was accurate mattered less electorally than the political perception it produced: a sense among many Hindu voters in Bengal that the eastern border was a frontier of vulnerability.
The BJP’s campaign translated that vulnerability into three linked promises. First, the party presented itself as the defender of persecuted Hindu refugees from Bangladesh, especially through the Citizenship Amendment Act. This legislation offered a fast track to Indian citizenship for refugees from Bangladesh, Pakistan and Afghanistan – except if they were Muslim.
The rules of this act were notified in March 2024, and the first citizenship certificates were issued in May 2024.
Second, the BJP framed undocumented migration as proof of the Trinamool’s alleged “vote bank” politics that favoured Muslims.
Third, it tied both issues to state power: only a BJP government, it implied, could align Kolkata with New Delhi on border security and citizenship verification. The brilliance and danger of this strategy lay in its double address. To Hindu migrants from Bangladesh, it offered recognition. To Bengali Muslims, it extended suspicion.
The Matua question sat at the centre of this double address. Matuas, a community of Dalit refugees from East Bengal (as the province was known before Partition) and Bangladesh, are not merely a caste bloc – they embody the messiness of 1947. They have long faced the intertwined burdens of caste marginalisation, displacement, uncertain citizenship status, documentary precarity and uneven access to welfare and political recognition.
During the campaign, the Trinamool tried to court the Matuas through welfare and cultural recognition. The BJP offered a more existential bargain: citizenship as a correction to the historical injustices they have faced.
This is why the voter roll controversy mattered so profoundly. The Special Intensive Revision of the electoral rolls was not simply an administrative exercise; the BJP projected it as a referendum on who belonged.
Twenty seven lakh people contested their names being deleted from the rolls. Though critics argued that the revision process especially targeted voters from minority communities, the BJP framed it as democratic purification.
Here the Bangladesh factor moved from rhetoric to infrastructure. The border was reproduced in the polling booth, in the list, in the anxious queue of citizens with a sheaf of documents in hand proving that they were citizens.
Faced with claims that West Bengal is home to lakhs of undocumented migrants from Bangladesh, Trinamool leader Mamata Banerjee noted – correctly – that the international border is guarded by the Centre and that the Border Security Force takes its orders from the Union Home Ministry. She denounced the BJP’s rhetoric as communal.
But these arguments were defensive. They answered charges but they did not remove the fear.
For 15 years, the Trinamool fused welfare populism with Bengali exceptionalism: the belief that Bengal’s political culture would resist North Indian Hindutva. The 2026 verdict suggests that exceptionalism is no longer effective. The BJP has learned to speak Hindutva in Bengali.
The Bangladesh factor allowed BJP to connect local anxieties about jobs, crime, corruption and welfare leakage to a larger narrative of national injury. It allowed Hindu consolidation to appear not as majoritarian aggression but as self-defence. It forced the Trinamool into the impossible position of defending Muslim citizens without being branded as a party that supported infiltrators, and defending refugee-migrant communities that crossed from East Pakistan after Partition and later Bangladesh without being accused of manufacturing voters.
Bangladesh’s instability deserves serious attention; attacks on minorities, Islamist mobilisation and anti-India rhetoric cannot be dismissed as inventions. But neither can they be used to justify presenting Indian Muslims as proxies for a foreign state.
Bangladesh has always mattered to Bengal through Partition, language, migration, rivers, labour, kinship, memory and mourning. What changed in this campaign is the political form. The border became an electoral weapon. The BJP won because it knows that history does not always stay in the distant past. It can be summoned to influence choices at the voting booth.
Niladri Chatterjee is a historian and senior lecturer at Linnaeus University in Sweden.
Source: Scroll
Related Posts: India, World, BJP, West Bengal, Bangladesh, illegal migration, illegal bangladeshis
India had asked the United States not to allow reporters to ask questions during Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s meeting with President Donald Trump on the sidelines of the G7 summit in France in June, US Ambassador to India Sergio Gor said on Saturday
8 hours ago
Former Australian captain Greg Chappell with the support of 20 other former international skippers appealed to the Pakistan Government led by Prime Minister Muhammad Shehbaz Sharif, to provide ‘humane treatment and proper medical care’ for Imran Khan
11 hours ago
The shock resignation of Tata Sons chairman N Chandrasekaran earlier this month has left corporate India's top job vacant. But finding his successor will be no easy task for the country's most revered conglomerate, whose sprawling $300bn empire spans Jaguar Land Rover and Air India as well as
11 hours ago
Iran's President Masoud Pezeshkian defended a memorandum of understanding with the United States as the best way out of a stalled war. Meanwhile, the new head of the Islamic Republic's top security body warned, in a more forceful tone, of retaliation if neighbouring countries support U.S
11 hours ago
Authorities in China have launched an investigation into reports of formaldehyde being used to preserve the freshness of cabbages for human consumption. Officials in the northeastern Hebei province confirmed that they had verified footage showing individuals dipping cabbages in a solution before
11 hours ago
Three newborns died after a fire that broke out in the neonatal intensive care unit of a government hospital in Maharashtra’s Amravati district in the early hours of Monday, PTI reported. The fire broke out at the Amravati District Women’s Hospital around 3
11 hours ago
Imran's party demands immediate cardiac care for him at Shifa International Hospital Imran's party demands immediate cardiac care for him at Shifa International Hospital Published on: Aug 24, 2026, 11:10:49 IST PTI Prefer HTon Google Share via Copy link Islamabad
11 hours ago
Japanese Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi’s three-day visit to New Delhi in July 2026 for the India-Japan summit appears to have elevated relations between the two Asian countries into a fresh phase of strategic expansion. Ties had already undergone a remarkable transformation over the past decade
11 hours ago
How well do COVID antivirals actually work? Not as well as we thought How well do COVID antivirals actually work? Not as well as we thought Published on: Aug 24, 2026, 11:11:50 IST PTI Prefer HTon Google Share via Copy link Sydeny, If you're aged over 70
11 hours ago
On Sunday, in a post on X, Wali said the audio contained "explosive evidence" and claimed that Brar admitted his gang had ordered Nijjar's killing, alleging that the assassination was driven by an inter-gang feud. Ottawa: Three years after NIA designated terrorist Hardeep Singh Nijjar was killed in
14 hours ago
Until recently, there would have been little to distinguish Vietnam's so-called Justice Tree from the hundreds of others lining the streets of Hanoi. Then the bouquets started piling up. It was here that former politician Nguyen Sy Cuong was driving his BMW in May last year when he veered into the
14 hours ago
Fast-fashion giant Shein says it plans to raise up to HK13.86bn (£1.3bn; $1.77bn) when its shares start trading on the Hong Kong stock market on 1 September. In a filing on Monday, Shein said it will offer nearly 280 million shares for between HK$47.60 and HK$49.50
14 hours ago
A fast-moving, wind-driven wildfire near Reno, Nevada, has forced about 42,000 people to evacuate, while another 45,000 have been urged to prepare to leave. The Hawk Fire has burned 15,040 acres, destroyed some homes and injured six people. Officials declared a state of emergency as the blaze
14 hours ago
Former Indian diplomat Navdeep Suri has raised concerns about the verification process under the Special Intensive Revision of electoral rolls. Suri, a retired Indian Foreign Services officer, went through the process in Punjab. It is among the 16 states where the voter roll revision is being
14 hours ago
A moderate earthquake with a preliminary magnitude of 5.9 rattled eastern Japan, including the Tokyo area, early Sunday (August 23, 2026), injuring more than 20 people, most of them slightly, officials said. There was no danger of a tsunami. According to the Japan Meteorological Agency
1 days ago
Chinese humanoid robots broke records set by humans, including beating Usain Bolt’s 100-meter sprint world record, on the opening day of the Olympics-like World Humanoid Robot Games in Beijing on Saturday (August 22, 2026). More than 2,000 humanoid robots were participating in the event
1 days ago
One afternoon in 1907, a young accountant named Chandrasekhar Venkata Raman walked into the laboratory of the Indian Association for the Cultivation of Science at 210 Bowbazar Street in Calcutta. Though he had a passion for the sciences, colonial India offered no stable careers in the field
1 days ago
Three first information reports were filed against 14 identified and more than 200 unidentified persons on Saturday in connection with clashes between the police and student protesters a day earlier, PTI quoted Ranchi Superintendent of Police Paras Rana as saying
1 days ago
Did an Amazon delivery guy assault a 71-year-old man in California? What we know about the attack and lawsuit A California lawsuit alleged that an Amazon delivery driver assaulted a 71-year-old man at an Elk Grove gas station. Updated on: Aug 23, 2026
1 days ago
‘Pure evil’: Videos of mothers splashing water at their kids spark outrage amid Lindsay Clancy trial Social media videos of mothers throwing water at their children have sparked concerns amid Lindsay Clancy's trial. Published on: Aug 23, 2026
1 days ago
The sister of jailed former Pakistan Prime Minister Imran Khan on Saturday (August 22, 2026) filed a petition in the Supreme Court, accusing the government and senior officials of violating the top court’s order to shift him to a private hospital for medical examination and treatment
1 days ago
The United States and Canada have entered into uncharted territory. The longtime allies and economic partners, who have enjoyed free trade for decades, are now in an escalating trade war with no clear off ramp. And for Prime Minister Mark Carney
1 days ago
Harrisburg weather update: Special Weather Statement issued for central Pennsylvania as thunderstorms bring 40mph wind NWS has issued a Special Weather Statement for Harrisburg and surrounding parts of central Pennsylvania. Published on: Aug 23, 2026
1 days ago
The police in Maharashtra’s Latur have registered a first information report against Abhijeet Dipke, the founder of the Cockroach Janta Party political campaign, for allegedly entering a government school without permission, threatening teachers and defaming the institution
1 days ago
The United States and Iran exchanged defiant messages ahead of Monday’s (August 24, 2026) scheduled announcement of new U.S. economic sanctions that could impact the Islamic Republic and Tehran’s most important trading partners including China
1 days ago
Fourteen people were killed in military air strikes at a monastery in Myanmar early on Friday, opposition fighters and a local rescue worker have said. All of those killed were elderly and a number of monks were also injured, the rescue worker told BBC Burmese, adding that the site was struck twice
1 days ago
The Armed Forces Tribunal on Thursday upheld an administrative censure for a brigadier who was commanding a sector of the Rashtriya Rifles in Jammu and Kashmir’s Poonch district in December 2023 when three civilians died during an interrogation following a militant attack
1 days ago
