Bangla Pride, Urdu Prejudice

In West Bengal today, nationalism wears saffron robes. What once carried the voices of Rabindranath Tagore’s humanism and Kazi Nazrul Islam’s defiance, has been refashioned into a weapon that strikes at Muslims, especially those who speak Urdu. Nativist ethno-linguistic groups like Bangla Pokkho—which loosely translates to “Bengali Front”—have set off language wars that marginalise Bengali Urdu speakers, but are celebrated in the Bengali intelligentsia as defenders of their culture. This reveals a dangerous paradox: in resisting Delhi’s Hindi-Hindu supremacy, they reproduce its very logic. The BJP’s idea of a Hindu India that speaks Hindi is conveniently repackaged in Kolkata as the idea of one Bengal, with one tongue, and one identity.

This shift is not accidental. It is the careful handiwork of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, which knows that it does not need the Bharatiya Janata Party’s political victories to spread its worldview. Whether under saffron banners or the slogans of “Joy Bangla”—Hail Bangla—the ground is being prepared for a future where the plural heart of Bengal is silenced. Here, the erasure of Muslims is not sudden or spectacular; it is quiet, bureaucratic and relentless. The question is no longer whether Bengali nationalism can defend pluralism, but whether it has already become another mask for Hindutva.

In recent years, the BJP’s main ploy in West Bengal was to attack Bengali Muslims by terming them Rohingya and Bangladeshis, and demonising these populations in the rest of the nation. This strategy was supposed to mobilise Hindu votes in the state by ganging up against the supposed intruder musalmans. But the lack of a strong BJP leadership in the state put the party on the back foot in the last election, forcing it to retreat. In an effort to beat the BJP at its game, leaders of the All India Trinamool Congress have echoed its politics. To protest the targeting of Bengali-speaking migrants in BJP-ruled states, it launched a “language movement,” carrying out protests in favour of safeguarding Bengali language and identity. Non-Bengali legislative assembly leaders too have taken out such marches in Muslim ghettos of Kolkata, where a majority of residents speak Urdu.

This wave of collective sympathy and action in favour of a particular language, even by those who do not speak it, might defy the BJP’s politics and make the TMC’s chances stronger for 2026, but it will also result in a resurgence of Bengali nationalism. What was once wielded as a tool of defence against the BJP’s Hindi and Hindu supremacy, will soon become an easy weapon of offence, used by other bodies to spread the same virus that destabilised Bangladesh over five decades ago—the Bangla versus Urdu divide.