Due to the importance of India's support and cooperation in our freedom struggle, the public-private representation of India in the celebration of the golden jubilee of Bangladesh's independence is a very natural and expected thing. Of course, politics does not follow any formula. That is why the Nehru family, which has played the biggest role in supporting India in the war of liberation, is not hosting a Subarna Jayanti. Rahul Gandhi, the grandson of Indira Gandhi, as the Leader of the Opposition could not take part in any event, it seems. Those who oppose the visit of Prime Minister Narendra Modi for political reasons do not seem to have opposed the visit of the President of India. So, the issue of politics comes up for discussion.
For several days now, Indian newspapers have been reporting that Prime Minister Modi is paying special attention to his visit to Bangladesh in the context of his country's electoral politics. The Anandabazar in Kolkata or the Hindustan Times in Delhi have made it clear that the vote of the Matua community is especially important in the upcoming elections in West Bengal. The Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), a Hindu nationalist party led by Prime Minister Modi, is now using all sorts of tactics to get a majority in the West Bengal state assembly. And part of that strategy is to win the support and sympathy of the Matua community. Although the visit was on the occasion of the golden jubilee of Bangladesh's independence and the birth centenary of Bangabandhu, his visit included the Harichand-Guruchand temple at Orakandi in Kashiani upazila of Gopalganj and the Jessoreswari Kali temple at Shyamnagar in Satkhira.
A detailed explanation of why the Matua community is important in the West Bengal elections can be found in Perth Pratim Bhattacharya's 'Modi on Twin Mission' report in Dhaka's Daily Star. He wrote that there are about three and a half crore Matuas in West Bengal, of whom one and a half crore are voters. Out of the 294 seats in the state assembly, 30 will be decided by the votes of this community and they can influence the election in about 63 more seats. There is a kind of frustration among the Matua community over the non-implementation of the Citizenship Amendment Act or CAA in India. A large section of the Matua population has been living in the border districts of West Bengal since the Pakistan period, migrating at different times.
Bishwanath Chakraborty, a professor of politics at Rabindranath Tagore University, told the newspaper that Modi's visit to Orakandi was very political. He is going there to seek the support of voters. Mahitosh Vaidya, general secretary of the All India Matua Federation, also told the paper that the Prime Minister's visit to Orakandi before the state assembly elections would definitely influence Matua voters to vote for the BJP. He also said that the Matua community was overwhelmed by the Prime Minister's visit to the Matua community temple in Orakandi. A large section of the Matua community voted for the BJP in the 2019 Lok Sabha elections in the hope that they would get Indian citizenship if the amendments to the Citizenship Act came into force. But the BJP is a bit worried about the Matua community's vote as the issue has returned to the state assembly polls.
There is no denying that Prime Minister Modi's visit to Orakandi and parts of Shyamnagar is intended to be a prayer campaign for a state in India. Which means that Bangladesh is giving a special advantage to a rival party in the state elections of West Bengal. Unfortunately, the party that is taking advantage of this, the party’s citizenship law is already widely criticized as a Bengali-speaking and anti-Muslim law. Even the UN human rights chief has called on India to repeal the law. The law has already deprived about 1.9 million Bengali speakers, mainly Muslims, of citizenship in Assam and threatened to expel them from the country, calling them Bangladeshis. It is not clear how many lakhs of Bengali-speaking Muslims will lose their Indian citizenship if the law comes into force in West Bengal. But there is no doubt that it will be much more than Assam.
We need to remember on the golden jubilee of independence that the state of West Bengal has borne the brunt of the 1.5 crore Bangladeshis who took refuge in India during the war of liberation. The relevance of the political representation of the state in organizing the Golden Jubilee is therefore unquestionable. If the Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee had been invited, she too might have gone to Orakandi. Then at least the rival party in the election would not be given special benefits. We do not know whether our Foreign Office and the Organizing Committee considered these issues. However, since the Orakandi visit proposal and the politics of voting have been discussed in Indian newspapers for a couple of weeks now, the issue demands special importance.
The role of the State Government of West Bengal in bilateral relations is by no means negligible, as we have seen in the question of water sharing of the common rivers, including the Teesta and the Farakka. Or have we assumed that there is a shift in power in West Bengal?
Indian politicians have always rejected the views of any other country on Indian politics. The country's diplomats are a little too vocal on the issue. The Canadian Foreign Ministry issued a stern statement in response to Prime Minister Trudeau's support for the ongoing Indian peasant movement. Britain's House of Commons last week He called on the British High Commissioner to the Indian Ministry of External Affairs to refrain from interfering in the internal affairs of the country. India's foreign ministry alleged in a statement that British MPs had organized such debates to appease their votebank. The votebank refers to people of Indian descent living in Britain, especially the Punjabi community.
There is nothing new to say about India's attempts to exert influence in other countries' politics, especially in elections. Prime Minister Modi gave the slogan 'Ab Ka Bar Trump Government' in the US elections. The memory of the then Foreign Secretary Sujata Singh's initiative to break the boycott of the opposition parties during the 2014 elections in Bangladesh should not be forgotten. We have heard what he said to former President and Jatiya Party chief General Ershad in the words of the late politician.
There is no room for debate on the fact that Bangladesh has become an issue in Indian electoral politics. However, given the sensitivity of the relationship, our government and the major political parties have maintained a policy of silence on the issue. But now that the Matua votebank has become part of Prime Minister Modi's visit, it is safe to say that Bangladesh's role in India's elections is no less important.
