Done With Celebrating Maharashtra? Now BJP Should Grapple With This Damning Reality

Elections are always special. Ain’t they? They are an opportunity for political parties to either double down on or rekindle their strategies. Unlike one would think, elections do not decide the end of an entity on its own. Sheikh Hasina’s rivals stand as a strong testament to it.

What they do provide is insight into policy and its framework driving the state’s future. In the Indian context  – especially post-1947, these decisions largely derived their inspiration from securing short-term benefits like a few kilograms of ration, free housing, and basic infrastructural needs.

They all are worthy goals to achieve. A sick society is always broken from within – both physically and mentally which makes it eminent to make the betterment of the average man a non-negotiable goal. 

The question is what will politicians and bureaucrats do after securing that? Pick a random politician and pose a query about it. Politicians will talk about increasing the allotment while bureaucrats will nod to politician’s ideas in the expectation of getting more power. 

The most enlightening answer you can ever come across from them is preparing for civilizational downfall in the context of the advent of Artificial Intelligence.

That does sound better, only till the horror unfolds that the most active civilisation is already at the brink of destruction – credit for which goes to this polity consisting of the election cycle, elected and unelected politicians, and bureaucrats more interested in generating more power and wealth for themselves.

Post-1947 minority appeasement and related regressive policies constantly invoked protection from Constituton and in effect, Judiciary has hindered the comeback of civilisation even though foreigners were long gone.

The 2024 assembly elections in Jharkhand and Maharashtra acted as tests for those wanting and working for civilisational revival. Maharashtra has seen incidences like the Paghar lynching of Sadhus and 12000 people marching to its capital Mumbai seeking arrests for speaking truth to power.

As dates came closer, Muslim leaders tried their best to galvanise their community- even threatening that those voting against the diktat would be thrown out of the community. It did create a counterforce in favour of Hindus but the worrying thing in Maharashtra is leaders choosing not to criticise Islamic fundamentalists.

If we leave out this exception, Hindutva warriors and party cadre did well on this front and Mahashtra-based Hindus won’t have to face the government-backed wrath of Muslim appeasement on the scale it was seen earlier. 

The loss of Uddhav Thackeray and his seeking forgiveness for Babri Masjid does hurt though despite his opportunism being obvious. Bala Saheb was not just an unapologetic Hindu for Dharmic people, his penchant for the cause gave us lofty expectations from anyone having Thackeray as surname – let alone his son.

The larger problem looms in Jharkhand though. While Maharashtra has an 11.5 percent Muslim population according to the 2011 Census, in Jharkhand their share is 14.5 percent. It does not sound like a problem until one realises that grandfathers and grandmothers of 90 percent of them had ditched India for Ummah.

Unlike Mewati’s Muslims who were stopped by Gandhi, these people did not listen to anyone. Later a lot of them faced persecution and that is how a new Islamic majority country in the form of Bangladesh was formed. 

Bangladesh did not initially prosper as such – forcing most of the people located in border districts of India to come here. We will get to statistics around it later, but first, consider the gravity and absolute cognitive dissonance of this situation.

They choose to not settle in India believing that they will be better off at the place where those who follow the same religion as them are in power. When it did not materialise they started to invade the same country which they had ditched in the hunt of the brotherhood.

Merriam-Webster Engish dictionary defines invasion as “the incoming or spread of something usually hurtful”. The generally understood meaning is that it is the incursion of an army that ultimately turns into a plunderous activity.

Even though the majority of those who came here did so as economic migrants, the de facto state of affairs is that resources reserved for the seeds of great men and women who showed faith in the oldest flourishing civilisation ultimately becomes open to looting for those whose forefathers didn’t – the ultimate purpose of invasion.

As reported by TFI earlier, these Bangladeshis have pilferage into neighboring states of Bihar and Jharkhand. In Jharkhand, they lie right at the epicenter of the foundational bloc of state – the Santhal Pargana region. As the name suggests, the region which encompasses Dumka, Deoghar, Jamtara, Pakur, Godda, and Sahebganj traditionally had tribal dominance.

However, due to migration from West Bengal and Bangladesh, Muslims form over 38 percent of Sahebganj and Pakur’s population, 25 percent in Godda, 24 percent in Deoghar, 22 percent in Jamtara, and 10 percent in Dumka. In Barharwa (Sahebganj), their population rose from 8 percent in 1971 to 55 percent today.

Resultantly, love jihad, vote Jihad, and forcing tribals out of their own den are quite common here. BJP raised the issue and did the best it could in its capacity, but failed in convincing voters to vote for this issue.

Except for the Jarmundi seat in the Dumka district, the party was not able to secure a single constituency in the whole of Santhal Pargana. Even in Godda – whose member of parliament is newly emerging Hindutva icon Nishikant Dubey – the party lost all seats. In Deoghar, where Baidyanath Temple, one of the 12 Jyotirlingas of Lord Shiv exists, the party failed to convince voters.

BJP won’t get Muslim votes is now becoming an axiom, but the fact that even tribals are not voting tells us something. What Jharkhand Mukti Morcha, Congress, and RJD have done is bring victims (tribals) and perpetrators (Bangladeshis) on the same page.

Tribals – most of whom are poor – now live under the false illusion that whatever is being done is ultimately beneficial for them. An example of it can be seen in interviews of tribal women who are officially Mukhiya of their villages but it is their Muslim husbands who run the show. These women are happy and proudly defend the phenomenon.

Those who have seen it happening would never deny the possibility that the BJP seeking eviction of illegal Bangladeshis translated as BJP looking to harm one of their own tribals. It is now becoming alarmingly clear that a vast section of tribals now do not see Bangladeshi Muslims as outsiders.

Bangladeshis are now their own and Tribals will go to any extent for their protection – as they did or rather were coerced to do during this election. This is what transpired in many places, including in those villages where such couples reside. 

With five years still to go and Hemant Soren looking to double down on his appeasement policy – Santhal Pargana is following the trajectory of Bihar’s Seemanchal area and West Bengal under Mamata Banerjee. 

The fallout of such an alliance is going to be an unreal threat to India. Santhal Pargana of Jharkhand and Seemanchal of Bihar are both infested by Bangladeshis coming there from Malda, Murshidabad, and Dinajpur districts of Bengal.

Look at the way all these places are placed on the map. Here is how it looks when we see Santhal Pargana, Seemanchal, and Bangladeshi-infested districts of West Bengal on the map. They all are very close to the Bangladesh border and one district has road connectivity to another and so on. They stay towards the border area of districts on connecting roads and have the power to stop any vehicle or convoy due to their numbers.

A little zoom in and one can see the northernmost point in this node is that of Kishanganj in Bihar. A simple Google map will tell you that it is barely 101 km away from Siliguri Corridor or Chicken’s Neck – a 22km long geo-political and geo-economical corridor connecting the seven states of northeast India to the rest of India.

This area, spanning the northern region of Bengal’s Uttar Dinajpur district and the southern part of Darjeeling district, lies sandwiched between Bangladesh to the east and the heavily Muslim-majority districts of Kishanganj and Purnea in Bihar to the west, rendering it particularly susceptible to vulnerabilities.

Radical Islamists residing in Seemanchal of Bihar now have the backing of their brothers and sisters living in the Santhal Pargana region. 

Their top brass has always expressed a desire to cut the chicken’s neck from mainland India and it was their most sought-after strategy during the CAA-NRC riot. Though it is no longer in the news, a Hindi phrase, “Maqsad nahi bhoolna hai” is quite applicable here. 

For the next five years, Santhal Pargana is expected to witness more and more illegal immigration from Bangladesh.

After Sheikh Hasina was removed from a coup, enthusiast Bangladeshis tried to begin a campaign for the Greater Bangladesh project. Here is how its map looks like

The areas earmarked for the Islamist project have many similarities to the aforementioned places in Santhal Pargana, Seemanchal, and the border districts of Bangladesh. 

Suddenly, Nishikant Dubey’s idea of carving out Union government-controlled union territory does not look like a fringe idea. It is something rooted in reality.