Assam Chief Minister Himanta Biswa Sarma, while addressing the media on November 4 in Ranchi, the capital of Jharkhand, alleged: “Hemant Soren is a spokesperson of infiltrators.” By infiltrator, he meant Jharkhand’s Bengali-speaking Muslims, most of whom, if not all, he evidently holds as infiltrators from Bangladesh.

This remark came three days after Sarma alleged that under Chief Minister Soren’s rule, Hindus were becoming ‘outsiders’ in Jharkhand. A couple of days before that, on October 29, Sarma alleged that Jharkhand’s Santhal Pargana region “is in line to become mini-Bangladesh”. He even compared himself with the Ramayan epic’s Lord Hanuman—well, almost—when he likened his ‘setting fire on infiltrators’ to Hanuman’s setting Lanka ablaze.

Sarma is an unusual challenger to Chief Minister and Jharkhand Mukti Morcha (JMM) leader Soren. Jharkhand and Assam are about 500 km apart, share no border and have few socio-cultural and political similarities. Sarma was never involved in politics in Jharkhand, and no one perhaps ever expected or imagined an Assamese politician would turn into Jharkhand’s biggest polariser until the BJP, in June, made Sarma a co-in-charge of the party for the Jharkhand Assembly election.

Since then, he has eclipsed all Jharkhand BJP leaders, including former Chief Ministers Babulal Marandi and Arjun Munda, and even the BJP in-charge for the Jharkhand election, former Madhya Pradesh Chief Minister and current Union Agriculture Minister Shivraj Singh Chouhan. As in every other place he goes, Sarma hogs the headlines. He has been entrusted with popularising a new brand of politics in Jharkhand—vilification of Bengali-speaking Muslims as ‘Bangladeshi infiltrators’, a task in which he has excelled since joining the BJP in 2015—to challenge Soren’s tribal-oriented party.

Assam has long had a history of anti-Bengali politics, targeting, often violently, both Hindu and Muslim Bengalis for their alleged roots in Bangladesh. Under Sarma, the BJP excelled in Assam in isolating and partly dehumanising the Bengali-speaking Muslims as ‘infiltrators’—with his tirade of speeches targeting their lifestyle, belief and culture—while describing Bengali-speaking Hindus as ‘refugees’. He accused Bengali Muslims of engaging in “fertiliser-jihad” and called their women “child-producing machines”. He described them as “very, very communal and fundamentalist people” who were “distorting Assamese culture”.

Seeing the polarising potential in him, the BJP elevated Sarma to the helm of the North East Democratic Alliance (NEDA), the BJP-led alliance for northeast India. The year 2024 gave Sarma an even bigger platform to perform, as a star speaker in different parts of the country during the Lok Sabha election campaign. It was during that time, in May 2024, that Sarma started telling the people of Jharkhand—a state that shares no border with Bangladesh—that he, a man of experience concerning infiltration from Bangladesh, had come to warn Jharkhand’s residents of their impending danger from infiltration and demographic change. This marked a tectonic shift in Jharkhand’s politics.

New Narrative

Until a few months ago, the major ideological conflict between the JMM and the BJP was in the former’s assertion of tribal identity outside of the fold of Hinduism; whereas, the latter claims tribal people as part of Hindu society. But in the BJP’s current plan, Soren has been depicted as one who is harming tribals by allowing Muslims to settle in their land.

Soren hit back at Sarma multiple times. Apart from accusing the Assam chief minister of playing divisive politics and spreading hatred, Soren accused Sarma’s Assam government of denying ST status for tribals of Jharkhand origin living in Assam and the atrocities committed on tribal women in riot-torn Manipur. Soren highlighted how the tribals’ land, forests and other natural resources had come under threat during the BJP’s rule.

According to the 2021 census, 67.8 per cent of Jharkhand’s population identify as Hindu, 14.5 per cent as Muslim, 12.8 per cent as followers of the Sarna (tribal) religion and 4.3 per cent as Christian. Of the state’s 26.2 per cent Scheduled Tribe (ST) population share, some identify as followers of Sarna, some of Hinduism and some of Christianity. The Christians, most of whom are tribals, live in Chhota Nagpur region in southern Jharkhand. Muslims live predominantly in the Santhal Pargana region of eastern Jharkhand, made of the districts of Pakur, Sahibganj, Godda, Jamtara, Deoghar and Giridih.

The Santhal Pargana region at the trijunction of West Bengal, Bihar and Jharkhand is part of a larger region where Muslims have lived in high concentration for many decades, in fact, centuries. It is contiguous with Bihar’s Seemanchal or northeastern part, where Katihar, Purnea and Kishanganj have a high Muslim demographic concentration, and West Bengal’s northern-central districts of Uttar Dinajpur, Malda, Murshidabad and Birbhum, of which the first three are Muslim-majority districts.

It is the Bengali-speaking Muslims of the Santal Pargana region who have been Sarma’s principal target since June, after being formally appointed for Jharkhand election management. He claims infiltration is “not a political issue” for him but “a matter of life and death”. He even demands a law to prohibit the marriage of tribal women with ‘infiltrators’.

His claim of widespread illegal infiltration from Bangladesh has been challenged by the JMM, the Congress and other opponents of the BJP. In September, the Jharkhand Janadhikar Mahasabha and the Loktantra Bachao Abhiyan, two rights-based outfits, conducted a fact-finding exercise about the claim of infiltration from Bangladesh. They visited the Santhal Pargana districts to see the ground reality and studied census documents, starting with its 1901 edition. They later told the media that they found the Bengali-speaking Muslims living in Pakur and Sahibganj are indigenous to Jharkhand.

Lead Actor

Political observers point out that the BJP started looking for new issues after it won only two out of the 28 ST-reserved seats in the 2019 Assembly election. In 2022, Danyaal Danish, a BJP worker, filed a Public Interest Litigation (PIL), alleging that infiltration from Bangladesh was changing the states demography and infiltrators were luring tribal women into marriage to get land titles. They raked up the infiltration issue ahead of the 2024 parliamentary election, but the electoral misfortune continued. They lost all three ST-reserved seats that they had won in 2019. They upped the ante on infiltration thereafter.

According to a Ranchi-based NGO worker, who is unwilling to be identified, Sarma is merely the ‘hero’ of a play written and directed by the top echelons of the BJP. Indeed, every BJP politician—including Union Home Minister Amit Shah and Prime Minister Narendra Modi—has highlighted the issue.

Danish’s PIL came up for hearing before the Jharkhand High Court in August 2024. The court expressed concern and sought responses from the Union and the state governments. In September, Shah’s ministry echoed the BJP’s charges in its report before the court. Simultaneously, the National Commission for Scheduled Tribes, headed by Madhya Pradesh BJP leader Antar Singh Arya, submitted a report echoing what Danish had alleged in his PIL. Asha Lakra, the NCST member and a senior BJP leader from Jharkhand, wrote the report.

But it has been up to Sarma to lead and sustain the attack. At one election meeting in the Palamu, he said if the BJP comes to power, towns like Hussainabad and Haider Nagar will be renamed. At another meeting, he warned that if Hindus did not remain electorally united (in favour of the BJP), the likes of Irfan Ansari and Alamgir Alam would reign. Ansari and Alam are the only two Muslim politicians from Jharkhand to ever get any ministerial berth. Researchers have previously shown that Muslims have remained underrepresented in state’s politics.

Polarisation, however, is not the only thing Sarma is valued for. He is also known as a ‘master strategist’ for his role in leading the BJP’s alliance in northeast India. In Jharkhand, too, Sarma played a crucial role in getting some JMM leaders to defect to the BJP and stitching together an alliance with the All Jharkhand Students’ Union (AJSU), the Janata Dal (United) and the Lok Janshakti Party (LJP). Results will tell us if we are to see the rise of a new Hindutva star.