Al Jazeera :
Sitting at a dusty roadside tea stall with his friends in Bada Sanakad village in the tribal-dominated eastern Indian state of Jharkhand, Abdul Gafur is furious.
“Who says we are Bangladeshi infiltrators? Hear me out, we are the registered citizens of India. To date, God knows how many of our generations have passed away on this land.
So, do not insult our ancestors by calling us infiltrators,” said the 46-year-old farmer, as nearly a dozen of his companions, most of them Muslims, nodded in agreement.
Gafur is a Muslim, a community in Jharkhand that Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) has been painting as “Bangladeshi infiltrators” for months as it seeks to unseat a coalition of opposition parties, led by Chief Minister Hemant Soren’s Jharkhand Mukti Morcha (JMM), in the two-phase state assembly election that started on November 13.
Bada Sanakad falls in Jharkhand’s Pakur district, which together with Godda, Deoghar, Dumka, Jamtara and Sahibganj districts form what is known as the Santhal Pargana region, which votes in the second phase of the election on Wednesday.
The region, with 18 seats in the 81-member state assembly, is dominated by tribal groups, who along with Muslims form about 50 percent of Santhal Pargana’s population and have traditionally been voting for anti-BJP parties.
Across Jharkhand state, the tribes and Muslims – at 26.2 percent and 14.5 percent respectively, according to the 2011 census – form nearly 41 percent of Jharkhand’s 32 million population.
Analysts say it is this pattern of voting among the tribals and Muslims that the BJP aims to break this year by invoking the “Muslim infiltrator” bogey.
In 2019, the right-wing party won only four of 18 Santhal Pargana seats, while in the parliamentary elections earlier this year, the BJP failed to win the two seats reserved for the tribals and won one of the three from the region.
India’s affirmative action programme reserves some state assembly and parliamentary seats for historically marginalised groups, including dozens of tribes and less-privileged castes.
The programme also extends such quotas in state-run academic institutions and government jobs.
Pakur, located on the northeastern end of Jharkhand, is barely 50km (32 miles) from the Bangladesh border.
It also adjoins the Muslim-dominated Murshidabad district in neighbouring West Bengal state. It is for this reason that most residents in Santhal Pargana speak Bengali, a major South Asian language spoken in West Bengal as well as Bangladesh.
The bogey of a Bangladeshi infiltrator is not unfamiliar in India, especially since Modi came to power in 2014 on a Hindu majoritarian agenda.
What first started as a demonisation of the mainly-Muslim Rohingya refugees from Myanmar and Bangladesh metamorphosed into a broader campaign against Muslims in India’s northeast, especially in the state of Assam, home to millions of Bengali-speaking Muslims.
In Assam, where a third of its population is Muslim, the BJP and its allies have been running the “Muslim infiltrator” campaign for decades, alleging that Muslims entered the country from Bangladesh “illegally”, altered the state’s demographics, and took over lands and jobs.
Xenophobic campaigns demanding that such Muslims should be deprived of all citizenship rights, jailed or deported to Bangladesh have intensified since a BJP-led coalition first won Assam in 2016.
Since then, thousands of Muslims have been declared “doubtful” voters and dozens put in detention centres specifically designed to lock up “illegal” Muslims.
Now, Muslims in Jharkhand fear that politics is being transported to their state: The BJP appointed Assam’s Chief Minister Himanta Biswa Sarma its election coordinator for Jharkhand in the run-up to the vote.
Sarma, 55, is a hardline politician accused of hate speeches and policies against Muslims. In several of his election rallies in Jharkhand, Sarma said his party would identify “the illegals” – as he claims he did in Assam – and “push them to Bangladesh”.
Sarma also promised to replicate Assam’s controversial National Register of Citizens (NRC) in Jharkhand if the BJP wins.
The NRC, originally ordered by India’s Supreme Court in 2013, aims to identify and deport immigrants in India who do not have valid papers. In 2019, Sarma’s government used the NRC drive to remove nearly two million people from the citizenship list – about half of them Hindus.
Though the BJP had declared its intent to implement NRC nationwide, it has been seen using the issue selectively in some regions.
“The country knows that 900,000 Hindus and 700,000 Muslims were left out in the final draft of Assam’s NRC,” Jharkhand-based lawyer Shadab Ansari told Al Jazeera, adding that such campaigns will have no effect in a tribal-dominated state.
