Book review: Santana Khanikar, State, Violence, and Legitimacy in India

Published date01 June 2019
AuthorSanjay (Xonzoi) Barbora
DOI10.1177/2321023019838877
Date01 June 2019
Subject MatterBook Reviews
/tmp/tmp-179xS4LLZ7nmop/input Book Reviews 95
who had fled to India during and after the war. Along with this, declaration of Islam as the state religion
of Bangladesh in 1988 made a huge number of Bangladeshi Hindus take refuge permanently in West
Bengal. The CPI(M)-led government was accused of being facilitators of illegal Bangladeshi migrants
by BJP, which the party, however, denied. The party, which has been sympathetic to the humanitarian
aspect of migration, however, advocated for effective measures including stricter visa issue policies to
stop cross-border migration. The Trinamool Congress, which is in power in the state now, has refused to
term the Bangladeshi migrants as ‘threatening Others’. In BJP’s Hindutva discourse, ‘Hindu Bangladeshi
constitutes “refugees” whereas Muslim Bangladeshis constitutes “infiltrators”’ (p. 140). The party alleges
that ‘migration is a part of a conspiracy by the Muslim Bangladeshis to expand the Bangladeshi nation
and create a “Greater Bangladesh” in India’ (p. 141).
In Chapter 4 titled ‘The “Infiltrators” of Delhi’, the author argues that the ‘Delhi discourse on
Bangladeshi migrants is about the Hindutva ideology pronounced by the Sangh Parivar and led by the
BJP’ (p. 175). Delhi’s demography substantially changed after partition, due to settlement of Hindu, Sikh
and Punjabi refugees from west Pakistan. The Bangladeshi migrants discourse in Delhi surfaced in
1980s onwards in the context of political developments in the country, such as terrorism in Kashmir, the
Khalistan movement, anti-Sikh riots, and the destruction of the Babri Masjid. Operation Pushpak
launched by Congress-led Union Government in 1992 and the declaration of war against Bangladeshi
Muslims in the post-Babri Masjid demolition by the Sangh Parivar also contributed towards the consoli-
dation of the communal fervour in the capital city of the nation. Congress, the secular party, also
compromised with its ideological position in the post-Nehruvian era for political mileage.
Although the book is an important contribution towards...

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