BL Santhosh is right: Bengal is a civilisational battle. Here’s why the land of Netaji must be saved from TMC’s appeasement, with a volatile Bangladesh next door

India, that is Bharat, is a civilisational state. Home to diverse social, religious, ethnic and linguistic communities, India, despite its modern nation-state outlook, has its roots in the Hindu civilisation and cultural continuity. The Indic civilisation has been under constant threat from foreign invaders and colonisers. Bengal, which has been the cradle of the Indian renaissance, is crumbling under the burden of TMC’s appeasement politics. Recently, BJP leader BL Santhosh declared that the coming West Bengal assembly election is a “civilisational battle”.

At the recently held ‘Sagar Manthan’ program in Goa, BJP’s organisational secretary, BL Santhosh, declared that the assembly election in West Bengal is not a mere battle for power but a civilisational battle.

“Bengal is not a political battle, it’s civilisational. We look at it in the same way. To save India, we have to save Bengal. That will not be our 19^th or 20^th state…to save India from a big demographic challenge, we want to win Bengal, and we will win Bengal because of your blessings,” he said.

Bengal is not a battle for power for us.
For us, Bengal is a battle to protect civilisation.

If India has to be saved, Bengal must be saved.

With your blessings, we will form the government in Bengal, come what may.

– Shri B L Santhosh, General Secretary (Org) pic.twitter.com/JL7NERzngm

— Amit Malviya (@amitmalviya) December 29, 2025

Predictably, the BJP leader’s remarks have irked the ruling Trinamool Congress. The TMC leaders have criticised Santhosh’s remarks, saying that his remarks are divisive and that somehow India’s civilisation faces a threat from the BJP itself.

TMC’s Shashi Panja claimed that for the last decade, the BJP has undermined India’s foundational values, including pluralism, tolerance, and freedom, replacing them with hatred, cultural dominance and intimidation.

Amusingly, while the TMC government appeases Muslims in the state and the sitting Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee proudly declares that she is fighting against “Kafirs”, TMC MP Sagarika Ghosh invoked Netaji Subhash Chandra Bose, Rabindranath Tagore, and Swami Vivekananda to highlight Bengal very civilisation that TMC’s politics threatens.

While political violence is not a TMC-exclusive phenomenon in West Bengal, the state has seen its worst form under over a decade of Mamata Banerjee’s rule. Muslim appeasement, rapid demographic alteration, illegal infiltration of Bangladeshi Muslims via the porous Indo-Bangladesh borders and anti-Hindu activities coupled with economic downslide have defined the Mamata era in West Bengal. It is said that demography is destiny, and no civilisation can prevail and thrive if this ‘destiny’ is corrupted or dangerously modified.

Why West Bengal must be saved from TMC for the Civilisation to be saved

Such was Bengal’s intellectual and philosophical richness that it was said that “What Bengal thinks today, India thinks tomorrow.” Bengal is the sacred soil that gave the country gems like Bankimchandra Chatterji, Swami Vivekananda, Aurobindo, Rabindranath Tagore and Netaji Subhash Chandra Bose. However, in the contemporary political scenario, this civilisational goldmine is being reduced to a barren and gloomy desert by the Mamata regime.

For over three decades, the Communists ruled West Bengal; their Marxist ideology resulted in driving out big companies and investments. The communists stripped the state’s people of numerous jobs these industries could have generated, a better life, prosperity and dignity. Besides, mocking Hindu Dharma was also a core aspect of their ideological-political agenda.

Mamata Banerjee was a sharp, critical voice against the CPIM. When she came to power in the state in 2011, it was expected that Banerjee would heal the wounds West Bengal suffered under the communists. However, Mamata Banerjee only scratched the wounds and sprinkled salt over them, but also inflicted new injuries.

In around 14 years of the reign of “Didi”, over 6,668 companies have migrated out of West Bengal. Afghanistan is known as the “graveyard of civilisations”. Under the TMC rule, West Bengal has become a “graveyard of industries”.

While the people of West Bengal are already grappling with unemployment, the TMC government abolished all the policies implemented from 1993 to 2021 to attract industries, ensuring that businesses will not get any concession on setting up industries in the state, whether in the form of land or electricity prices.

Such is the condition that despite being the fourth most populous state in India, West Bengal has only a 3.5% share in India’s industrial output. It is estimated that over 22 lakh to 30 lakh Bengalis have moved to other states as migrant workers, because of a shortage of employment in their home state.

As per the latest CAG report, West Bengal’s debt-to-GSDP ratio now touches 33.7%, one of the highest in the country. In over a decade of Mamata Banerjee’s rule, West Bengal has witnessed a sharp jump in its debt burden. 

In addition, West Bengal also falls into the category of 11 states that are using borrowed funds to finance routine expenditure, such as salaries, subsidies, and administrative costs, rather than creating assets that could improve the state’s financial health in the long run. Scams, syndicate raj and consequent migration of workers is crippling West Bengal’s economy, while the only flex TMC is left with is having a woman as the state’s Chief Minister.

The question arises: If economic growth is not the TMC government’s priority, what is? The answer is simple: Clinging to power through appeasement politics and political high-handedness is TMC’s modus operandi. Basically, TMC replaced Marx with Muslim appeasement. In a slogan, TMC’s rule is about ‘Maa, Maati and Manush’, in reality, it is ‘Mamata, Muslims and Menace’.

OpIndia has reported several incidents wherein the state government demonstrated its blatant favouritism towards Muslims and disdain towards Hindus. It was reported last year that a Durga Mandir was found blocked and barricaded in Kaliachak town in Malda district of West Bengal. The development came a day before the Islamic month of Muharram. Before this, CM Mamata Banerjee imposed restrictions on the immersion of Durga idols in 2016 and 2017 to make way for Muharram processions. 

TMC’s Muslim appeasement is not confined to suppressing Hindu rights and doing special favours to its Muslim votebank; it extends to blatant support to the Islamisation of West Bengal. Last year, TMC leader and a Cabinet Minister in the state government, Firhad Hakim, derided non-Muslims as ‘unfortunate’ and openly called for their religious conversion to Islam. “Those who were not born into Islam were born with misfortune. If we can give them Dawat (call for proselytisation) and bring Iman (Faith) in them, then we will make Allah happy. We need to spread Islam among non-Muslims. If we can bring someone on the path of Islam, then we will prove to be true Muslims by ensuring the spread of Faith,” said Firhad Hakim, who is also Mamata Banerjee’s close aide.

The TMC leader getting a free hand to insult non-Muslims and openly advocate for the state’s Islamisation should not be a surprise, given CM Mamata Banerjee herself has on many occasions declared her political adversaries as “Kafirs” or infidels as per Islam, and that she is fighting against them.

In Mamata’s Bengal, a TMC MLA, Hamidul Rahman’s alleged close associate, Tajemul Haque alias JCB, holds an ‘Insaf Sabha’, and brutally assaults a woman in public, and the TMC MLA justifies this Taliban-style flogging by saying that there are some ‘codes’ in a ‘Muslim Rashtra’. 

Another question here would be, why do ‘secular’ political parties go for a Muslim appeasement tactic when there are other religious communities too, with significant populations? Why not Hindu appeasement? This is because Muslims are arguably the only community who vote as a religious community; they think about elections from a religious perspective, consider voting out parties not coddle them as almost a religious duty. No other community trades their vote for religious benefits or dominance; the others largely consider local issues, governance, economy, inflation and other regular issues while voting.

Thus, Muslim appeasement is an effective tactic to consolidate votes, and since the influential section of the community has somehow mastered the art of being the extremists and victims of extremism at the same time, ‘secular’ parties go to any extent to have their backing.

This extent stretches to even allowing demographic change in the state. It is reported that West Bengal has nine districts presently that are Muslim majority, compared to three that were predominantly Muslim both before and after independence.

 In districts like Murshidabad, Malda, Uttar Dinajpur, and North and South 24 Parganas, the Muslim population grew at a higher rate than the Hindu population. For this reason, the Hindu share in these districts declined. Even the Hindu population declined by over 1% in some districts, much higher than the national average. With a change in religious demography, a lifestyle change, the look of the localities, politics and overall functioning of an area alter. Shifting demographics determine local politics, school education, festival management, and land disputes. The inorganic Muslim population surge in once Hindu-dominant districts essentially indicates the eventuality of the erasure of Hindus and the civilisation there.

Hindus are now minorities in large parts of their own homeland, courtesy TMC’s state-sponsored vote engineering. While Hindus are forced to leave their state and work in other states for a livelihood, they are replaced by Bangladeshi Muslim infiltrators.

Any attempt to diffuse the demographic time bomb is met with sharp opposition from the TMC. OpIndia reported earlier about the Mamata regime’s scathing criticism of the Election Commission’s Special Intensive Revision (SIR) exercise. When the SIR began in Bihar, thousands of names of illegal voters emerged, and the ‘secular’ parties, including TMC, claimed that the BJP is targeting minorities (read, Muslims). When authorities launched a crackdown on Bangladeshi and Rohingya Muslim infiltrators illegally residing in various Indian states, the TMC government claimed that Bengali Muslims are being targeted and invoked ‘Bengali Asmita’ (Bengali pride).

During the ongoing SIR in West Bengal, it was recently revealed that since the last SIR in 2002, registered voters in the state have increased by 66% from 4.58 crore to 7.63 crore. Out of the 10 districts in the state which have experienced the alarming rise in the number of voters, 9 districts border Bangladesh.  The minimum increase in the number of voters is over 70% with the highest percentage of increase crossing 100%. Uttar Dinajpur has witnessed the highest spike in the number of voters at 105.49%, followed by Malda at 94.58%. As discussed earlier, the Muslim population in these districts has increased inorganically and abruptly, indicating that a deliberate demographic shift is being pulled off.

When the security agencies and the Central government want to prevent the influx of Bangladeshi illegals into India via a 2,217 km porous Indo-Bangladesh border, the TMC government shows reluctance in cooperation. Earlier this year, it was reported that the TMC government did not agree to provide land for fencing 600 kilometres of area, which allowed several illegal immigrants to enter India. In December 2024, BJP leader Suvendu Adhikari accused the West Bengal government of not cooperating with the Border Security Force (BSF) in curbing infiltration.

Even when the state government approves the land acquisition for border fencing, the district officials are found to be causing delays in the disbursal of funds. Besides, when the Modi government brought the Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA) in 2019 to grant Indian citizenship to persecuted Hindu and other non-Muslim minorities from neighbouring Islamic or Muslim-majority countries, Mamata Banerjee and her party, linked it to the NRC and Uniform Civil Code (UCC) to fearmonger that somehow Muslims will be singled out, their citizenship will taken away, and they will be dumped in detention centres.

This fearmongering politics triggered violence back then, and the ultimate target in such Islamist violence, be it during anti-CAA agitation or the anti-Waqf Bill protests, is Hindus.

In Mamata Banerjee’s West Bengal, political violence, particularly after elections, be it assembly elections or panchayat elections, is almost ritualistic. The Trinamool Congress workers often attack workers from opposition parties, indulge in booth capturing during elections, and target voters who did not vote for TMC. Be it Islamist-orchestrated violence or TMC-unleashed post-poll violence, the casualty is always Hindus.

Before BL Santhosh, Assam BJP leader and Chief Minister Himanta Biswa Sarma had also called the impending Assam state elections a “civilisational battle”. CM Sarma’s remarks stemmed from the rampant menace of demographic change in the state. Illegal Muslim immigrants expelling tribals and local Hindus to settle there, illegal encroachment of land and properties, as well as assertion of Islamic religious dominance, have been highlighted by the Assam Chief Minister.

The BJP government in the state has been working relentlessly to free lands from illegal encroachments by illegal Bangladeshi and Rohingya settlers and prevent demographic change. The state government has been detecting, detaining and deporting Bangladeshi and Rohingya illegals from the state.

Earlier, CM Sarma warned that the rate at which the Muslim population is increasing in the state, Assam would make it a Muslim-majority state by 2041. In fact, the entire northeast is grappling with a rapid shift in the religious composition of the population. This is alarming. A seemingly slow but certain death of the Indic civilisation sans timely policy interventions.

What is happening in Bengal becomes even more concerning when we look at a chaotic Bangladesh, where lynching of Hindus for being Hindus, desecration of their temples by Muslims has become a disturbing ‘normal’.

Ever since the forced ouster of Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina from power and her country in August 2024, the persecution of Hindus and other non-Muslim communities, and Islamisation of the country, have been ongoing in full swing. The 5^th of August 2024 marked the tearing apart of the semi-torn secular fabric of the Muslim-majority Bangladesh.

Since Hasina’s ouster, Rabindranath Tagore’s and Satyajit Ray’s ancestral properties have been vandalised by Islamist and India-hating mobs. Muslim mobs in Bangladesh attack cultural, religious, and historical sites. The visuals of mobs vandalising the statue and residence of Bangladesh’s founding father, Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, made it clear that the Islamist-dominated post-Hasina Bangladesh will cut off its secular roots.

Under Muhammad Yunus’s leadership, Islamists are erasing their secular history and mainstreaming Islamist anti-Hindu and anti-India viewpoints by groups which were earlier dismissed as fringe. Once the civilisational battle is lost and a civilisation collapses, the Islamist adversary gets on with the task, erasing even the memories of the fallen civilisation.

Even the Islamists in Bangladesh claim to be ultra nationalist and true protectors of Bangladeshi interests. However, crushing of the media, systematic targeting of political adversaries, glorification of anti-India ‘activists’, crackdown on music and cultural events, appeasement of Islamist populace and unchecked killings of Hindu minorities, and forced mass resignation of Hindu employees, indicates, that secularism, plurality, tolerance and other such cliches are used only till the ultimate power grab, be it via street veto, political conspiracy, a gradual demographic shift or through a combination of these. What follows is a full-blown erasure of the existing civilisation and establishment of Islamist anarchy.

India’s West Bengal is vulnerable to cross-border influences and infiltration. A restive Bangladesh under Islamist dominance may fuel communal tensions in the state. While it took only a few months to turn Mujibur Rahman and Sheikh Hasina’s somewhat secular and economically sound Bangladesh into a full-fledged Islamist dominated mess, the way demographic change, rising Muslim population and dominance as well as a systematic suppression of Hindu rights is unfolding in West Bengal, the state is indeed in a civilisational crisis and the coming elections, which the BJP calls a civilisational battle, will see the BJP fighting to save the civilisation while the TMC will defend its empire.