Muslims in India’s poll-bound Bihar battle ‘Bangladeshi infiltrator’ tag | Elections Information

Kishanganj/Katihar, India – Greater than a decade in the past, when Mukhtar Alam* studied at a authorities faculty in Kishanganj, the one Muslim-majority district in japanese India’s Bihar state, he had Hindu mates.

Alam was particularly near one among them. The 2 would do their research and college initiatives collectively. Alam would keep away from meat after they ate collectively in order to not make his vegetarian pal uncomfortable.

However an incident two years in the past created a rift of their friendship, which has not been bridged since.

Addressing a rally in Kishanganj, Jitanram Manjhi, a former chief minister of Bihar and a outstanding ally of Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Occasion (BJP), mentioned the Shershahbadi group of Muslims had been “infiltrators” from Bangladesh, India’s neighbour within the east, the place greater than 91 % of the inhabitants is Muslim and primarily speaks Bangla.

The time period Shershahbadi is derived from the historic Shershahbad area, which incorporates areas within the neighbouring West Bengal state. The title Shershahbad, in flip, is believed to be derived from Sher Shah Suri, an Afghan king who defeated the mighty Mughals and briefly dominated over the trendy areas of Bihar and Bengal (together with Bangladesh) within the sixteenth century.

In contrast to Hindi and its dialects, in addition to Urdu, spoken extensively throughout Bihar, the Shershahbadi Muslims communicate a dialect of Bangla blended with Urdu and Hindi phrases. They’re sometimes called “Badia” (a probable brief type of Shershahbadi) or “Bhatia”, which derives its origin from the native dialect “Bhato”, which means going towards the river’s stream, because the Shershahbadi Muslims are mentioned to have migrated upstream of the Ganges River from Malda to Murshidabad in West Bengal state, and eventually to the Seemanchal area in Bihar, India’s most impoverished state.

“We felt threatened [by Manjhi’s speech],” Alam, a Shershahbadi Muslim and graduate in enterprise administration, informed Al Jazeera.

Refusing to remain silent, he posted his condemnation on Fb. Inside minutes, a remark in Hindi popped up underneath his publish: “You individuals are Bangladeshi infiltrators.”

It was his greatest pal.

“Studying that remark despatched a shiver down my backbone,” recalled the 30-year-old Alam, sitting underneath the thatched roof of a major faculty he runs. “The remark created a rift between us. We developed belief points and misplaced our brotherhood, our friendship.”

Alam is one among 1.3 million Shershahbadi Muslims in Bihar, in response to a “caste census” printed by the state authorities in 2023, and most of them stay in Kishanganj and Katihar districts.

As Bihar, India’s third most populous state, heads in the direction of essential elections to its legislature that would impression nationwide politics, it’s these districts which have emerged as the main focus of a high-pitched BJP marketing campaign towards supposed “Bangladeshi infiltrators”.

Why Shershahbadi Muslims?

As India celebrated its Independence Day on August 15 final month, Prime Minister Modi addressed the nation from the ramparts of the Mughal-era Pink Fort in New Delhi, wherein he introduced the formation of a “high-powered demography mission” to seek out the infiltrators.

“No nation can hand itself over to infiltrators. No nation on the earth does so – how then can we enable India to take action?” Modi mentioned, with out specifying who these infiltrators had been. He added that via the mission, “the extreme disaster now looming” over the nation shall be addressed in a “deliberate and time-bound method”. His authorities has not but supplied particulars on the workings of the mission.

Hindu right-wing teams in India usually use the time period “Bangladeshi infiltrator” to focus on Bangla-speaking Muslims primarily within the states of Bihar, West Bengal and Assam. In Assam, the place Modi’s BJP has been in energy since 2016, the state authorities has been working a campaign against Bangla-speaking Muslims, labelling them “outsiders” and accusing them of making an attempt to change the regional demography.

Almost a 3rd of Assam’s inhabitants is Muslim – the best amongst Indian states. Solely the federally-run territories of Indian-administered Kashmir within the north and the Lakshadweep islands within the Arabian Sea have the next Muslim proportion than Assam.

In Bihar, the Muslim inhabitants stands at 17 million, or practically 17 % of its complete inhabitants of 104 million, in response to India’s final census carried out in 2011. About 28.3 % of these Muslims are concentrated in what is often known as Seemanchal (“frontier area” in Hindi), comprising Kishanganj, Katihar, Araria and Purnia districts. Katihar, Kishanganj and Purnia share their borders with West Bengal state, whereas the Bangladesh border is only a few kilometres from Seemanchal.

Bihar will maintain its state meeting election in two phases on November 6 and November 11, with the outcomes to be introduced on November 14.

The BJP has by no means fashioned a authorities by itself in the important thing northern state, ruling it for a great a part of the previous 20 years in coalition with a regional ally. Critics accuse it of now utilizing the “Bangladeshi infiltrator” pitch in Seemanchal to polarise the area’s voters on spiritual and linguistic traces.

Within the final two years, Alam says his worries have elevated manifold as Modi himself leads the BJP’s cost towards his group.

“These indulging in vote financial institution politics have turned Purnia and Seemanchal right into a hub of unlawful infiltration, placing the safety of this space in danger,” Modi had mentioned final 12 months whereas campaigning in Purnia for the overall elections.

He repeated his stance within the BJP’s election rallies in a number of districts of Bihar this 12 months.

“Right now, an enormous demographic disaster has occurred in Seemanchal and throughout japanese India due to infiltrators,” Modi mentioned in Purnia final week, promising to “throw each single infiltrator out”.

That drive is already underneath manner in different components of India.

‘Demons have come from Bangladesh’

Authorities in a number of BJP-ruled states have been cracking down on allegedly “illegal” Bangladeshi nationals, with a whole bunch of Bengali-speaking individuals deported from Assam, Gujarat, Maharashtra and New Delhi – regardless of most of them holding legitimate paperwork proving their Indian citizenship. Critics say the drive targets Muslims.

Earlier this month, the BJP’s Assam unit posted an AI-generated video on social media, titled “Assam With out BJP”. The 30-second clip claims the Muslim inhabitants within the state will quickly be 90 % and they’re going to take over all public areas – tea gardens, airports, stadiums, enable “unlawful” Muslim migrants to enter the state via barbed wire, and legalise consuming beef. Many Hindus from the privileged castes are vegetarians, and the sale or consumption of beef is banned in most Indian states.

Nonetheless, for the Muslims of Seemanchal, the bogey of a Bangladeshi “infiltrator” is a well-known rhetoric, because it feeds on a excessive focus of the group within the area and its proximity with Bangladesh.

Seemanchal residents say the BJP has been making an attempt for years to show the area right into a “Hindutva laboratory” – a time period usually related to Modi’s residence state of Gujarat after he grew to become its chief minister in December 2001. Hindutva, actually which means Hinduness, is a time period used extensively in India to explain the BJP’s supremacist politics. Barely a few months after Modi assumed cost, practically 2,000 Muslims had been killed in one of many worst massacres in fashionable India.

“Each time any Hindu majoritarian chief visits Seemanchal, we worry in regards to the feedback he’ll make towards us and the aftermath of it,” Alam informed Al Jazeera.

Final month, federal Minister of Textiles and Bihar-based BJP chief Giriraj Singh was additionally in Purnia, the place he mentioned at a rally: “Many demons have come from Bangladesh; we now have to kill these demons.”

In October final 12 months, Singh had organised a “Hindu Satisfaction March” in Seemanchal and the neighbouring Bhagalpur district, which additionally has a sizeable Muslim inhabitants. In the course of the march, he repeatedly invoked Bangladeshi infiltration in addition to different contentious subjects concentrating on Muslims, together with the difficulty of Rohingya refugees in India, and “love jihad” – a conspiracy principle propagated by Hindu right-wing teams that accuses Muslim males of luring Hindu ladies into relationships or marriages with a view to convert them to Islam.

“If these Badias [Shershahbadis], infiltrators, and Muslims slap us as soon as, we’ll unite and slap them a thousand instances,” Singh informed his supporters throughout final 12 months’s rally in Kishanganj as the group cheered.

Chatting with Al Jazeera, BJP legislator Haribhushan Thakur defended his social gathering’s marketing campaign towards the Shershahbadi Muslims in Bihar.

“It has nothing to do with polarisation or elections. It’s a proven fact that the Muslim inhabitants is rising in Seemanchal as a consequence of infiltration, so obligatory steps have to be taken,” he mentioned. “If infiltration shouldn’t be stopped, within the coming 20-25 years, Seemanchal will develop into Bangladesh.”

Pushpendra, a former professor of social work on the Tata Institute of Social Research in Mumbai, who goes by a single title, believes the BJP’s polarisation tactic can have a restricted impact in Seemanchal.

“The BJP had raked the [Bangladeshi] infiltrator difficulty within the 2024 Jharkhand state meeting election as effectively, but it surely didn’t work because the allegation had no substance,” he informed Al Jazeera, referring to the tribal-dominated state neighbouring Bihar.

“The identical factor will occur in Bihar as a result of Bangladeshi infiltration shouldn’t be there in Seemanchal. And the way will it even be? Seemanchal doesn’t share a border with Bangladesh.”

Many years-old marketing campaign

In India, the drive towards Bangla-speaking Muslims, accusing them of being Bangladeshi infiltrators, first started in Assam within the late Seventies, after a neighborhood scholar group hit the streets, calling for his or her removing. Consequently, 1000’s of Muslims had been both expelled from the nation or declared “uncertain” residents, placing their authorized standing in suspension and making them susceptible to persecution.

It wasn’t lengthy earlier than the motion reached Bihar, the place the difficulty was first raised by the Akhil Bharatiya Vidyarthi Parishad (ABVP), the coed wing of far-right Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS). Born in 1925, the RSS in its early days at instances drew inspiration from European fascist events, and is the BJP’s ideological mentor. Its said intention is to show a constitutionally secular India into an ethnic Hindu state. The organisation runs 1000’s of chapters throughout India and counts Modi and different high BJP leaders as its lifelong members.

Within the early Eighties, the ABVP claimed there have been 20,000 Bangladeshis in Seemanchal, who acquired their names added to the native voter listing. The RSS-led scholar group requested the authorities to assessment the listing – much like an train carried out in Assam, residence to hundreds of thousands of Bengali-speaking Muslims whose ancestors migrated from Bangladesh over the many years.

The Election Fee of India accepted the ABVP’s calls for in 1983, and practically 6,000 Muslims had been served discover by the electoral physique to show their citizenship – all of them belonging to the Shershahbadi group.

“They had been requested to supply their land possession paperwork. We organised a camp, collected paperwork and took a delegation to the state capital, Patna,” recalled septuagenarian Jahangir Alam, then a younger activist who fought towards the ABVP’s drive by presenting the related paperwork of the accused to the authority. The counterdrive succeeded, and never a single citizenship was cancelled.

“Your complete episode was orchestrated by the ABVP,” Jahangir informed Al Jazeera.

The identical marketing campaign has seen a revival in Seemanchal, with a number of BJP leaders demanding an Assam-like National Register of Citizens (NRC) drive in Seemanchal. The NRC is a database designed to incorporate the names of all Indian residents. Its essential goal is to determine and take away undocumented or “unlawful” migrants.

In Assam, the NRC course of was accomplished in 2019 with the publication of an inventory that excluded nearly two million people, labelling them as non-citizens. Modi’s authorities has repeatedly mentioned it desires a nationwide rollout of the NRC.

“Your complete demography in Katihar, Kishanganj, Araria, Purnia and Bhagalpur has modified as a consequence of Bangladeshi infiltrators,” BJP parliamentarian Nishikant Dubey mentioned throughout a speech in parliament in 2023.

“I request the federal government to implement NRC to drive all Bangladeshis out,” he added.

Akbar Imam*, a resident of Katihar’s Shershahbadi-dominated Jangla Tal village, informed Al Jazeera the Hindus in his village had been already discussing the prospects of grabbing the properties of Muslims discovered to be alleged Bangladeshi infiltrators.

“When NRC got here up in Assam, there have been murmurs amongst Hindus about who will seize which Muslim’s home and different properties after we are thrown out,” mentioned Imam, a 46-year-old farmer, at a tea stall over the embankment of the Ganges River in Katihar’s Amdabad. “We’ve got to be prepared for every little thing, however it might be troublesome to collect outdated land paperwork to show our citizenship.”

‘Normalisation of communal segregation’

Just lately, the Election Fee of India carried out a controversial revision of the voter listing in Bihar, giving the BJP a brand new salvo to assault Muslims in Seemanchal. Referred to as the Special Intensive Revision (SIR), the train, affecting practically 80 million voters within the state, concerned strict documentation necessities from residents to be included as a voter. The transfer triggered criticism that it was a authorities ploy to exclude Muslims and different susceptible teams from the voter listing in a state the BJP desperately desires to win.

“Kishanganj noticed a 10-fold improve within the software of residential certificates in solely the primary seven days [of the SIR exercise]. This implies Bangladeshis is perhaps making an attempt to infiltrate,” Bihar’s Deputy Chief Minister Choudhary informed reporters in July when the train was on.

The Election Fee of India printed Bihar’s ultimate electoral roll on September 30, eradicating practically 6 % of 80 million voters throughout Bihar. Kishanganj, the district with practically 70 % Muslims, noticed the second-highest deletion fee at 9.7 %, whereas the overall removing of voters throughout Seemanchal was about 7.4 %. Gopalganj, the house district of Lalu Prasad Yadav, Bihar’s former chief minister and founding father of the BJP’s essential rival social gathering within the state, noticed the biggest variety of voter deletions.

In two information conferences on Sunday and Monday, India’s Chief Election Commissioner Gyanesh Kumar was repeatedly requested in regards to the variety of “overseas voters” detected and faraway from the electoral rolls – the ploy behind the SIR train.

“The principle causes for deleting names had been [that] some had been useless, some didn’t qualify as residents of India, some had been enrolled a number of instances, and a few had shifted from Bihar,” he mentioned. The ballot panel later mentioned that if any political social gathering or individual feels that an eligible voter’s title has been neglected, they will file a declare or objection.

Akbar, a Shershahbadi Muslim in Kishanganj, has made it to the listing. He informed Al Jazeera he was not terrified of the SIR course of, since he had the required paperwork. “Fortunately, we now have all of the proof. Those that are focused usually put together a robust defence,” he mentioned.

Tutorial Pushpendra mentioned the BJP’s drive to color Shershahbadi Muslims as Bangladeshi infiltrators is meant for electoral positive aspects past the Seemanchal area.

“BJP’s vilification of Shershahabadi Muslims is to not acquire solely in Seemanchal. They comprehend it is not going to profit them a lot in Seemanchal [given the high Muslim population]. By the demonisation of Seemanchal Muslims, they’re making an attempt to polarise Hindus in the remainder of Bihar in order to win extra seats within the election,” he informed Al Jazeera.

‘State of tension and uncertainty’

In the meantime, the BJP’s marketing campaign towards Shershahbadi Muslims has additionally had its social impact. Instructional establishments run by Muslims in Kishanganj, for instance, are seeing a discount within the enrolment of Hindu college students.

“Right now, hardly any Hindu household sends their kids to Muslim-managed faculties,” Tafheem Rahman, who has been working a personal faculty in Kishanganj for a decade, informed Al Jazeera.

Rahman mentioned when he began his faculty a decade in the past, about 16 % of the scholars had been Hindus. Now, it’s simply 2 %.

“In actual fact, even prosperous Muslim households are opting out. This quiet exodus from shared instructional areas displays a extra harmful shift – a normalisation of communal segregation in on a regular basis life, formed and deepened by electoral politics,” he added.

The same development is being seen within the area’s well being sector.

“Hindu sufferers are hesitant to go to a hospital run by Muslims, particularly Shershahbadis,” says Azad Alam, a Shershahbadi Muslim who owns a personal hospital in Kishanganj. “Even medical associations hardly ever stand for Muslim medical doctors after they want assist.”

But, many Hindus Al Jazeera talked to within the Seemanchal area say they don’t consider in such segregation alongside spiritual traces.

“If a Hindu in Kishanganj thinks he shouldn’t go to a Muslim physician or a Muslim-owned faculty, it’s mistaken. Kishanganj is a Muslim-majority district; it might be unimaginable for Hindu companies to outlive with out Muslims. Ninety % of my prospects are Muslims. And if I would like a physician, I search for a great physician first, not the physician’s faith,” mentioned Ajay Kumar Choudhary, a 49-year-old washerman.

However Amrinder Baghi, a 62-year-old lawyer in Katihar who has been related to the BJP for many years, mentioned he believes “unlawful” Muslims have entered the nation, and that the federal government ought to act on it.

“I consider that if somebody enters a rustic illegally, it’s the full duty of the federal government. For instance, if somebody enters my home, it means both I’m weak and being overpowered, or I’m robust however asleep,” Baghi informed Al Jazeera.

Such a polarised atmosphere demoralises the group, says Adil Hossain, a professor of sociology on the Azim Premji College within the southern metropolis of Bengaluru.

“Seemanchal has a improvement downside, however there’s a concerted try to border it as a safety difficulty by elevating the bogey of unlawful infiltration. That is pushing individuals right into a state of tension and uncertainty, which is the largest hindrance to them realising their potential as residents,” Hossain informed Al Jazeera.

Again in Kishanganj, Alam is preoccupied with the ideas of the BJP marketing campaign towards Muslims within the run-up to the essential polls.

“Each time politicians make feedback on Shershahbadi Muslims, we should give clarification that we aren’t infiltrators. An environment of worry is being created in our group,” he says in a trembling voice, as his eyes wander in the direction of the cloudy sky.

“Being a Shershahbadi Muslim, these feedback hold taking part in on my thoughts like a illness… like a ghost.”