Religious and ethnic fault lines in Bengal — the region split between India and Bangladesh — are hardening as politicians on both sides increasingly appeal to religious sentiment. Observers warn the shift is reshaping local identities and reviving long-standing divisions.
In Bangladesh’s recent parliamentary contest, Islamist parties made striking gains. Jamaat-e-Islami scored its strongest national showing to date, taking nearly a third of the vote in what many saw as a major moment for Islamist politics. Across the border in India’s West Bengal, the Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) rose from roughly 10% of the vote share in 2016 to nearly 46% in the latest election, a surge that under the state’s first-past-the-post system translated into 207 of 294 legislative seats.
Anthropologist Rezwana Karim Snigdha says this trend reflects an “ill-motivated” recasting of identity. The region once sustained a shared Bengali identity that allowed people to be both Bengali and Hindu or Bengali and Muslim, she notes. Now, political narratives on both sides increasingly frame identity in religious terms, sidelining language, culture and common heritage.
The current dynamics echo an older history. Bengal has been divided repeatedly, most dramatically under British rule in 1905 when Viceroy Lord Curzon partitioned the province along communal lines. That move was widely seen as an attempt to break a growing anti-colonial unity by setting Hindu-majority western districts against Muslim-majority eastern districts. Strong opposition forced the British to reverse that partition in 1911, but the communal divisions did not disappear and re-emerged in 1947, when Bengal was divided permanently between Hindu-majority India and Muslim-majority East Pakistan (later Bangladesh).
Historians such as Dipesh Chakrabarty argue that the British “divide and rule” legacy still shapes politics in the region. He suggests that failures by some Hindu elites to accommodate plural claims then helped entrench communal separation — a pattern whose echoes are visible today.
The modern trajectory of identity politics in Bangladesh also follows its post-1947 political evolution. Bangladesh began life as part of Pakistan, but tensions over language, economic marginalization and political rights fed Bengali nationalism and culminated in a war of independence in 1971. The new nation’s founding leader, Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, made secularism a constitutional principle. After his assassination in 1975, however, the constitution was amended to include Islamic phrasing and later recognized Islam as the state religion, and successive political choices have elevated religious narratives over secular ones.
Analysts say these changes have been amplified by recent political strategies. Under Sheikh Hasina, the government made concessions to religious and nationalist forces: expanding the network of madrassas, removing some secular material from textbooks under pressure from Islamist groups, and sponsoring mosque construction — measures the government defended as efforts to counter radicalism but which critics say strengthened conservative religious influence.
At the same time, Bangladesh experienced a youth-led backlash in 2024. A Gen Z-driven uprising protested democratic backsliding, corruption and limits on press and speech, and culminated in the end of a 15-year Awami League run. Some see parallels across the border: West Bengal’s ruling Trinamool Congress (TMC) was removed through the ballot box amid similar public frustrations, and commentators argue the BJP’s landslide reflected voter disenchantment with the incumbent rather than wholehearted embrace of Hindutva ideology.
Indian writer and analyst Abhra Ghosh says, “This was less a vote for Hindutva and more a rejection of the TMC at any cost.” Still, he warns that if the BJP remains in power it could gradually entrench Hindu nationalist ideas in the state — and there are early signs of such a shift. The BJP already governs multiple northeastern states bordering Bangladesh where substantial Bengali-speaking populations live.
Commentators also fault a politics of appeasement for backfiring. Both Bangladeshi and Indian leaders have at times courted religious constituencies while trying to preserve broader support: in West Bengal, for instance, critics point to projects such as a large Hindu pilgrimage development intended to woo Hindu voters while retaining a nominally secular stance to keep Muslim support. Chakrabarty argues these short-term accommodations have ultimately strengthened hardline forces rather than bridging divisions.
Cultural memory and the voices of Bengal’s intellectuals are under strain. Snigdha points to figures such as Lalon, Rabindranath Tagore and Kazi Nazrul Islam, whose work emphasized cross-communal unity and a composite Bengali identity. She warns that as politics narrows identity to religion, those ideals are increasingly under pressure. When people emphasize being Bengali over labeling themselves Hindu or Muslim, they cut across the political narratives that profit from division.
As both countries navigate electoral shifts and social unrest, analysts urge attention to language, culture and shared history as counterweights to identity politics based on religion. Without such a reorientation, they warn, political competition may continue to deepen communal divides across a region that has historically harbored plural identities.