The Trinamool Congress will bring a proposal in the West Bengal Assembly on 5 August, condemning multiple proposals by BJP leaders to partition the state for the third time, after 1905 and 1947. In the last week or so, nearly half a dozen BJP leaders have demanded that the borders of West Bengal be redrawn, with chunks hived off to the Northeast or as separate Union Territories.
Now, for West Bengal, partition is a wound that has never healed. Why then is the BJP hell-bent on stirring this cauldron? Logically, even talk of partition can only benefit Mamata Banerjee and backfire on the BJP. If there is a bigger game plan afoot, a big picture is going to be slowly unveiled ahead of the Assembly elections in the state in 2026.
This may sound alarmist but conspiracy theorists could be forgiven for suspecting the worst.
Chronology samajhiye
On 10 June, BJP Balurghat MP Sukanta Majumdar was sworn into the Narendra Modi cabinet as Minister of State with two portfolios: education and development of the North Eastern region. The last time anyone from Bengal held the North Eastern development portfolio was 20 years ago, when late Tapan Sikdar, then-BJP MP from Dum Dum, was the MoS.
A little over a month into his new role, Majumdar dropped a bombshell: he said he had just submitted to Prime Minister Narendra Modi a letter suggesting eight districts of north Bengal be co-opted into the Northeast. His meeting with Modi reportedly lasted about 30 minutes, which, PMO watchers say, suggests a serious conversation. Now, Majumdar is a botany professor so he can be forgiven for being wanting in geography. But by what stretch of imagination could he bracket north Bengal with the Northeast? Probably realising he was wading into quicksand, he made noises about north Bengal joining the North Eastern Council ‘while remaining in West Bengal’. But he ended up sounding incomprehensible.
The next day, Nishikant Dubey, BJP MP from Jharkhand’s Godda, fanned the flames with an uninterrupted three-minute diatribe on West Bengal in the Lok Sabha. He claimed that Jharkhand’s tribal population had fallen to 26 per cent from 36 per cent in 2000, when the state was formed; at the same time, he claimed that the Muslim population went up by some astronomical percentage in some areas of the state. If that wasn’t enough, he added that ‘ghuspetiya’ or infiltrators from Bangladesh were marrying tribal women and settling into tribal villages, and that Muslims from Malda and Murshidabad in West Bengal were overrunning Hindu villages in Jharkhand and changing the state’s demography.
At no point did Dubey reveal where he got his data from, especially about Jharkhand’s tribal population. The Census survey hasn’t been conducted since 2011. In 2001 and 2011, the Census stated that Jharkhand had 26 per cent tribal population. But no one has yet questioned Dubey’s claims or the fine points of his data because the demand he raised next in Parliament was stunning: he reeled off a list of districts at the Bengal-Jharkhand-Bihar border that are apparently getting dominated by Muslims that he demanded be merged into a Union Territory—ostensibly, a place where the Centre could conduct NRC exercise without political opposition.
Following this, a BJP MLA from Murshidabad, Gauri Shankar Ghosh, cited an ‘infiltration problem’ and said Malda and Murshidabad should be turned into a Union Territory.
Fellow BJP MLA Subrata Maitra from Baharampur went a step further: he wanted parts of Nadia and South Dinajpur districts added to the imagined Union Territory comprising Murshidabad and Malda.
BJP Rajya Sabha MP Nagendra Roy aka Anant Maharaj joined the chorus and demanded the district of Cooch Behar be expanded to Greater Cooch Behar and granted Union Territory status.
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A sign
Is there some method to this madness? Or is this chorus for Union Territories and the carving up of West Bengal a sign of the BJP’s impoverished politics in the race for the 2026 Assembly election? The BJP’s founding father Syama Prasad Mookerjee had championed the cause of a ‘Hindu West Bengal’ back in the 1940s in circumstances that were very different. Is the BJP trying to emulate him in some distorted way?
The plan seems to be to cut up the state in such a way that Mamata Banerjee’s so-called 30 per cent Muslim vote bank is splintered badly, allowing the BJP to achieve what it has failed to do in the past: win an election and rule West Bengal, even if in a diminished geography.
The good news is that the BJP’s West Bengal unit is a divided house. Leaders more sensitive to the Bengali sentiment against the state’s bifurcation have stepped up to argue that the state’s issues must be resolved within the existing borders. Leader of Opposition in Assembly Suvendu Adhikari has put his foot down and veteran Dilip Ghosh, not known to be a Suvendu fan, has backed him on this.
These leaders know their history better than those clamouring to split West Bengal once again and know that the pain of 1947 still lingers in the Bengali mind. They also know BJP will not be allowed to repeat the machinations with which it won Darjeeling in 2009: by half-promising a separate state. The BJP has won the seat since but lost face and the trust of the people there.
Some argue that the BJP’s moves in West Bengal should not be taken seriously, as the party is internally divided into competing factions and remains clueless about the state. They argue that West Bengal has rejected the BJP so decisively in recent elections that the party will never recover from the rebuff.
But ignoring the BJP’s latest moves could be foolish. Its campaign should be taken very seriously and opposed strongly or else the party will succeed in normalising the idea of partitioning states for the sole purpose of political control.
Mamata Banerjee has already labelled it a conspiracy and said the partition of Bengal will mean the partition of India.
Monday’s fireworks in the Assembly could be a dry run for Diwali.
Monideepa Banerjie is a senior journalist based in Kolkata. She tweets @Monideepa62. Views are personal.
(Edited by Aamaan Alam Khan)