West Bengal is not merely a state. It is, in the telling of those who sought to win it back from the Trinamool Congress, a civilisational citadel – the cradle of the Bengal Renaissance, the land of Ramakrishna and Vivekananda, Bankimchandra and Tagore , Shyamaprasad Mookerjee and Netaji Subhas Chandra Bose. The political reclamation of Bengal is therefore not a conventional electoral victory. It is rather an act of rescue: of a culture under demographic siege, of an administrative apparatus captured by appeasement politics, of a border that has become a turnstile for illegal migration, and of a Hindu majority that has been systematically reduced to electoral irrelevance in district after district.
The data, when examined carefully, lends uncomfortable weight to parts of this case. It becomes infinitely more pertinent to examine this data in the light of the commemoration of the West Bengal State Formation Day on 20 June, marking the date in 1947 when the Bengal Legislative Assembly voted to partition the region, allowing the Hindu-majority western districts to remain in India, now relevant more than ever with a staunchly nationalist party in power in the state. The most arresting numbers concern population composition. West Bengal shares a 2,217-kilometre border with Bangladesh, the longest of any Indian state.
According to Census 2011 — the last full enumeration – Muslims constituted 27.01 per cent of West Bengal’s population, up from 25.25 per cent in 2001 and approximately 20 per cent at Partition in 1947. In districts abutting the Bangladesh border, the shift has been far more dramatic. Murshidabad, Malda, and Uttar Dinajpur are Muslim-majority districts, recording 66.3, 51.3, and 49.9 per cent Muslim populations respectively as of 2011. Projections based on differential fertility and continued migration suggest these figures have shifted further in the fifteen years since. The NFHS-5 (2019-21) recorded a Muslim TFR for West Bengal of approximately 2.4, against a Hindu TFR of around 1.7 – a gap of 0.7 children per woman that compounded over decades produces significant compositional change.
Applying conservative demographic modelling, Bengal’s Muslim share is estimated to have crossed 29-30 per cent by 2024, with border districts likely showing Muslim majorities or near-majorities in additional talukas. In six border districts, the Hindu population has declined as a share of the electorate in every electoral cycle since 1977. This is not conjecture – it is the arithmetic of voter rolls. The India-Bangladesh border running through West Bengal is among the most porous in the world. The Border Security Force (BSF) has consistently flagged infiltration as its most operationally taxing challenge on this front.
Official data tabled in Parliament shows that between 2017 and 2023, over 97,000 individuals were apprehended attempting illegal cross-border movement on the Bengal-Bangladesh frontier – an average of nearly 14,000 per year. Unofficial estimates from retired BSF officers place the number of successful crossings at between five and ten times higher. Fencing has been a persistent failure. Of the 2,217-kilometre border, approximately 1 , 8 4 0 kilometres are supposedly fenced, but a Parliamentary Standing Committee report from 2022 noted that over 740 kilometres of existing fencing was ‘non- functional, damaged , orincomplete ’. River- boundaries segments – particularly along the Padma, Ichhamati, and Mathabhanga- are structurally un-fenceable and have long been conduits for undocumented movement.
The challenge became more acute after the political turmoil in Bangladesh in 2024, which generated a fresh wave of attempted crossings. The fact remains that the TMC administration structurally inhibited BSF effectiveness within the state’s jurisdiction. The state-Centre standoff over BSF’s operational jurisdiction – the Centre extended BSF authority to 50 kilometres from the border in 2021, the Bengal state government refused to gazette the notification -thus created a contested operational zone that illegal networks exploited. Former Intelligence Bureau officers have noted that in several border talukas, local law enforcement’s symbiosis with smuggling networks cattle, Phensedyl cough syrup, gold, and humans – make effective border management functionally impossible without a change of government in Nabanna.
It can be argued that the electoral and demographic question cannot b e separated from a deeper civilizational one. Bengal’s Hindu intellectual and cultural heritage – the Durga Puja that UNESCO recognised as an intangible cultural heritage, the Baul tradition, the Shakta devotional current that runs from Kalighat to Tarapith, the flowering of Gaudiya Vaishnavism that lends spiritual depth to the soul of Bengal- was under tremendous structural pressure. In Murshidabad and parts of Malda, long-time Hindu residents reported steady outmigration – a quiet demographic retreat driven by a combination of economic marginalisation, low-level intimidation, and a perceived absence of state protection. The argument is not simply cultural sentiment.
It intersects with strategic geography. West Bengal’s ‘Chicken’s Neck’- the Siliguri Corridor, a strip of land as narrow as 22 kilometres connecting the northeastern states to the rest of India – runs through a region where demographic change and infiltration pressures converge most acutely. Any compromise of the Corridor’s security environment has consequences far beyond Bengal: it affects the logistical spine connecting Assam, Manipur, Nagaland, Mizoram, Tripura, Meghalaya, and Arunachal Pradesh to mainland India. The Chicken’s Neck corridor, thus, is not merely Bengal’s problem – it is India’s strategic jugular. The BJP’s 2021 performance in Bengal – 77 seats, 38.1 per cent vote share, the first time a non-Left, non-Congress, non-TMC party had crossed 35 per cent in the state – demonstrated that the electoral arithmetic, while challenging, is not prohibitive.
The party’s vote share trailed the TMC’s 47.9 per cent by nearly ten percentage points, but the distribution matters as much as the aggregate: in north Bengal and in the Hindu-majority rural constituencies of Junglemahal, the BJP ran competitive or dominant races. The 2024 general election complicated the picture. TMC recovered ground lost in 2021, winning 29 of 42 Lok Sabha seats with a consolidated Muslim vote. The 2026 assembly elections were therefore fought on multiple planes simultaneously: welfare delivery versus governance credibility, perceived secular Bengali cultural identity versus Bengal’s actual Hindu consciousness, and a TMC-led criminal syndicate that was formidable but increasingly contested from within by defection, factionalism, and the long shadow of corruption, systemic failure, policy paralysis, and political violence.
For those who framed the contest in civilisational terms, the 2026 election was not simply about replacing one government with another. It was about whether a state that once gave India its intellectual spine could reassert the terms on which it wished to be governed – demographically, culturally, and strategically – before the window of electoral possibility closed. And it did – Bengal voted unequivocally for change, for transformation, for redemption.
The case for Bengal’s political reclamation, rested on four interlocking arguments: that demographic change driven by illegal migration is altering the electoral and social composition of the state faster than any policy intervention has been able to reverse; that border management is functionally impossible without a state government willing to cooperate with central security architecture; that institutional decay – in policing, judiciary, and civil administration – has created a governance vacuum that emboldens criminality and anti-Hindu aggression; and that the cultural and strategic stakes extend far beyond West Bengal’s own borders.
Decisions by the newly sworn-in BJP government like handing over land around the Chicken’s Neck Corridor to the BSF for border fencing and the “detect, delete, deport” policy for illegal Bangladeshi and Rohingya Muslims within the first 30 days of assuming office have emerged as the sign of things to come. On the occasion of the West Bengal State Formation Day, it becomes increasingly poignant to underscore the fact that the story of Bengal’s cultural revival – or reclamation – is far from over. The first steps, however, have been taken and how.
(The writers are, respectively, national spokesperson of BJP and acclaimed author, and a Professor Politics, IILM University Gurugram. Population projections are the authors’ estimates based on Census 2011 baseline and NFHS-5 TFR differentials. BSF apprehension data is from MHA parliamentary responses and electoral data from the Election Commission of India.)