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 associates.
Alam was particularly near one in all them. The 2 would do their research and college tasks collectively. Alam would keep away from meat once they ate collectively in order to not make his vegetarian good friend 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 distinguished ally of Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Celebration (BJP), stated the Shershahbadi group of Muslims have been “infiltrators” from Bangladesh, India’s neighbour within the east, the place greater than 91 p.c 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 identify 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 fashionable areas of Bihar and Bengal (together with Bangladesh) within the sixteenth century.
Not like Hindi and its dialects, in addition to Urdu, spoken broadly throughout Bihar, the Shershahbadi Muslims communicate a dialect of Bangla blended with Urdu and Hindi phrases. They’re also known as “Badia” (a probable brief type of Shershahbadi) or “Bhatia”, which derives its origin from the native dialect “Bhato”, which means going in opposition to the river’s stream, for the reason that Shershahbadi Muslims are stated to have migrated upstream of the Ganges River from Malda to Murshidabad in West Bengal state, and at last 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, instructed Al Jazeera.
Refusing to remain silent, he posted his condemnation on Fb. Inside minutes, a remark in Hindi popped up below his put up: “You individuals are Bangladeshi infiltrators.”
It was his greatest good friend.
“Studying that remark despatched a shiver down my backbone,” recalled the 30-year-old Alam, sitting below the thatched roof of a main faculty he runs. “The remark created a rift between us. We developed belief points and misplaced our brotherhood, our friendship.”
Alam is one in all 1.3 million Shershahbadi Muslims in Bihar, in keeping with 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 direction of essential elections to its legislature that would affect nationwide politics, it’s these districts which have emerged as the main focus of a high-pitched BJP marketing campaign in opposition to 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 Purple Fort in New Delhi, by which he introduced the formation of a “high-powered demography mission” to search out the infiltrators.
“No nation can hand itself over to infiltrators. No nation on the planet does so – how then can we enable India to take action?” Modi stated, with out specifying who these infiltrators have been. He added that by means of the mission, “the extreme disaster now looming” over the nation will likely 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 typically 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 operating a campaign against Bangla-speaking Muslims, labelling them “outsiders” and accusing them of attempting to change the regional demography.
Practically a 3rd of Assam’s inhabitants is Muslim – the very 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 share than Assam.
In Bihar, the Muslim inhabitants stands at 17 million, or almost 17 p.c of its whole inhabitants of 104 million, in keeping with India’s final census carried out in 2011. About 28.3 p.c 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 non secular and linguistic strains.
Within the final two years, Alam says his worries have elevated manifold as Modi himself leads the BJP’s cost in opposition to 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 stated 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 stated in Purnia final week, promising to “throw each single infiltrator out”.
That drive is already below manner in different elements 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 lots of 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 p.c and they’ll take over all public areas – tea gardens, airports, stadiums, enable “unlawful” Muslim migrants to enter the state by means of 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.
Nevertheless, 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 attempting for years to show the area right into a “Hindutva laboratory” – a time period typically related to Modi’s house state of Gujarat after he turned its chief minister in December 2001. Hindutva, actually which means Hinduness, is a time period used broadly in India to explain the BJP’s supremacist politics. Barely a few months after Modi assumed workplace, almost 2,000 Muslims have been killed in one of many worst massacres in fashionable India.
“Every time any Hindu majoritarian chief visits Seemanchal, we concern concerning the feedback he’ll make in opposition to us and the aftermath of it,” Alam instructed Al Jazeera.
Final month, federal Minister of Textiles and Bihar-based BJP chief Giriraj Singh was additionally in Purnia, the place he stated at a rally: “Many demons have come from Bangladesh; we’ve got to kill these demons.”
In October final 12 months, Singh had organised a “Hindu Delight March” in Seemanchal and the neighbouring Bhagalpur district, which additionally has a sizeable Muslim inhabitants. Through the march, he repeatedly invoked Bangladeshi infiltration in addition to different contentious subjects focusing on Muslims, together with the problem of Rohingya refugees in India, and “love jihad” – a conspiracy concept propagated by Hindu right-wing teams that accuses Muslim males of luring Hindu girls into relationships or marriages to transform them to Islam.
“If these Badias [Shershahbadis], infiltrators, and Muslims slap us as soon as, we’ll unite and slap them a thousand occasions,” Singh instructed his supporters throughout final 12 months’s rally in Kishanganj as the group cheered.
Chatting with Al Jazeera, BJP legislator Haribhushan Thakur defended his celebration’s marketing campaign in opposition to the Shershahbadi Muslims in Bihar.
“It has nothing to do with polarisation or elections. It’s a indisputable fact that the Muslim inhabitants is rising in Seemanchal attributable to infiltration, so crucial steps have to be taken,” he stated. “If infiltration will not be stopped, within the coming 20-25 years, Seemanchal will turn into Bangladesh.”
Pushpendra, a former professor of social work on the Tata Institute of Social Research in Mumbai, who goes by a single identify, believes the BJP’s polarisation tactic may have a restricted impact in Seemanchal.
“The BJP had raked the [Bangladeshi] infiltrator subject within the 2024 Jharkhand state meeting election as nicely, however it didn’t work, because the allegation had no substance,” he instructed Al Jazeera, referring to the tribal-dominated state neighbouring Bihar.
“The identical factor will occur in Bihar as a result of Bangladeshi infiltration will not 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 in opposition to Bangla-speaking Muslims, accusing them of being Bangladeshi infiltrators, first started in Assam within the late Seventies, after an area pupil group hit the streets, calling for his or her elimination. Because of this, hundreds of Muslims have 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 problem 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 occasions 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 hundreds 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 checklist. The RSS-led pupil group requested the authorities to evaluate the checklist – much like an train carried out in Assam, house to tens of millions 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 almost 6,000 Muslims have been served discover by the electoral physique to show their citizenship – all of them belonging to the Shershahbadi group.
“They have been requested to provide 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 in opposition to 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.
“All the episode was orchestrated by the ABVP,” Jahangir instructed 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 establish 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 stated it needs a nationwide rollout of the NRC.
“All the demography in Katihar, Kishanganj, Araria, Purnia and Bhagalpur has modified attributable to Bangladeshi infiltrators,” BJP parliamentarian Nishikant Dubey stated 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, instructed Al Jazeera the Hindus in his village have 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,” stated Imam, a 46-year-old farmer, at a tea stall over the embankment of the Ganges River in Katihar’s Amdabad. “We have now to be prepared for the whole lot, however it will be tough to assemble previous land paperwork to show our citizenship.”
‘Normalisation of communal segregation’
Lately, the Election Fee of India carried out a controversial revision of the voter checklist 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 almost 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 checklist in a state the BJP desperately needs to win.
“Kishanganj noticed a 10-fold improve within the utility of residential certificates in solely the primary seven days [of the SIR exercise]. This implies Bangladeshis is perhaps attempting to infiltrate,” Bihar’s Deputy Chief Minister Choudhary instructed reporters in July when the train was on.
The Election Fee of India printed Bihar’s ultimate electoral roll on September 30, eradicating almost 6 p.c of 80 million voters throughout Bihar. Kishanganj, the district with almost 70 p.c Muslims, noticed the second-highest deletion charge at 9.7 p.c, whereas the entire elimination of voters throughout Seemanchal was about 7.4 p.c. Gopalganj, the house district of Lalu Prasad Yadav, Bihar’s former chief minister and founding father of the BJP’s essential rival celebration 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 concerning the variety of “international voters” detected and faraway from the electoral rolls – the ploy behind the SIR train.
“The principle causes for deleting names have been [that] some have been useless, some didn’t qualify as residents of India, some have been enrolled a number of occasions, and a few had shifted from Bihar,” he stated. The ballot panel later stated that if any political celebration or individual feels that an eligible voter’s identify has been disregarded, they’ll file a declare or objection.
Akbar, a Shershahbadi Muslim in Kishanganj, has made it to the checklist. He instructed Al Jazeera he was not frightened of the SIR course of, since he had the required paperwork. “Fortunately, we’ve got all of the proof. Those that are focused typically put together a powerful defence,” he stated.
Educational Pushpendra stated the BJP’s drive to color Shershahbadi Muslims as Bangladeshi infiltrators is meant for electoral positive factors past the Seemanchal area.
“BJP’s vilification of Shershahabadi Muslims is to not achieve solely in Seemanchal. They understand it won’t profit them a lot in Seemanchal [given the high Muslim population]. By the demonisation of Seemanchal Muslims, they’re attempting to polarise Hindus in the remainder of Bihar in order to win extra seats within the election,” he instructed Al Jazeera.
‘State of tension and uncertainty’
In the meantime, the BJP’s marketing campaign in opposition to Shershahbadi Muslims has additionally had its social impact. Academic 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 colleges,” Tafheem Rahman, who has been operating a personal faculty in Kishanganj for a decade, instructed Al Jazeera.
Rahman stated when he began his faculty a decade in the past, about 16 p.c of the scholars have been Hindus. Now, it’s simply 2 p.c.
“The truth is, even prosperous Muslim households are opting out. This quiet exodus from shared academic 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.
An analogous 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 not often stand for Muslim docs once they want assist.”
But, many Hindus Al Jazeera talked to within the Seemanchal area say they don’t consider in such segregation alongside non secular strains.
“If a Hindu in Kishanganj thinks he mustn’t go to a Muslim physician or a Muslim-owned faculty, it’s unsuitable. Kishanganj is a Muslim-majority district; it will be inconceivable for Hindu companies to outlive with out Muslims. Ninety p.c of my clients are Muslims. And if I want a health care provider, I search for a great physician first, not the physician’s faith,” stated 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, stated 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 instructed Al Jazeera.
Such a polarised surroundings demoralises the group, says Adil Hossain, a professor of sociology on the Azim Premji College within the southern metropolis of Bengaluru.
“Seemanchal has a growth drawback, however there’s a concerted try to border it as a safety subject 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 instructed Al Jazeera.
Again in Kishanganj, Alam is preoccupied with the ideas of the BJP marketing campaign in opposition to Muslims within the run-up to the essential polls.
“Each time politicians make feedback on Shershahbadi Muslims, we should give clarification that we’re not infiltrators. An environment of concern is being created in our group,” he says in a trembling voice, as his eyes wander in direction of the cloudy sky.
“Being a Shershahbadi Muslim, these feedback hold taking part in on my thoughts like a illness … like a ghost.”
