Waking up in West Bengal under the BJP |
As a child, mornings always carried more than the promise of a new day. They meant newspapers, discussions on politics, strains of Rabindra Sangeet over Akash Vani. For the first time in all these years, on the morning of 5 May 2026, all those things seemed so distant, as if from another life.
For the first time in independent Bengal, a far-right party is in power. Ironically, my state was the party’s ideological womb. As the baby journeyed through its life—metamorphosing from the Hindu Mahasabha to the Jan Sangh to achieve adulthood as the Bharatiya Janata Party—its dream to rule over Bengal took one hundred years to come true.
All this is very close to me. I am the daughter of a first-generation refugee. My father did not inherit stability. He built it, after losing his home, his rose garden, his trophies. He wasn’t alone, just one of millions who crossed borders during moments of rupture in the subcontinent’s history. Arriving in West Bengal as survivors looking for ground beneath their feet, a roof over their heads. Bengal was not just a place—it was a possibility. Through language, culture and community, Bengal offered a fragile but real sense of continuity after the traumas of displacement.
Growing up, I did not experience that displacement directly. But I lived with its memory. Today, as the BJP comes to power, the language of politics has shifted in ways that feel familiar—not because I have lived them before, but because I have inherited the memory of where they can lead. That sheer, all-too familiar dread of ‘not belonging’. Those words, that tone. Identity, citizenship, security, belonging—these are no longer........