The BJP calls Muslims in India’s tribal-dominated Jharkhand “Bangladeshis.”

Abdul Gafur is frustrated at a dusty roadside tea stand with his buddies in Bada Sanakad hamlet, Jhakhand, a tribal-dominated eastern Indian state.

Who claims we’re Bangladeshi infiltrators? We are registered Indian citizens. God knows how many generations have died in this country. The 46-year-old farmer urged, “Do not insult our ancestors by calling us infiltrators,” as over a dozen members, mostly Muslims, nodded in accord.

Gafur, a Muslim from Jharkhand, has been depicted by the BJP as “Bangladeshi infiltrators” in their campaign to defeat the opposition coalition led by Chief Minister Hemant Soren’s Jharkhand Mukti Morcha (JMM) in the two-phase state assembly election that began on November 13.

Bid to break anti-BJP voting bloc?

In Jharkhand, Bada Sanakad is in the Pakur district. The Pakur district, along with Godda, Deoghar, Dumka, Jamtara, and Sahibganj, is part of the Santhal Pargana area, which votes on Wednesday in the second round of the election. Tribal groups hold most of the 18 seats in the 81-member state assembly. Tribal groups and Muslims make up about half of the people of Santhal Pargana, and Muslims have generally voted for parties that are against the BJP.

According to the 2011 census, 26.2 percent of Jharkhand’s 32 million people are from tribes, and 14.5 percent are Muslims. Together, these groups make up nearly 41 percent of the state’s population.

Analysts say that the BJP wants to break this trend of voting among Muslims and rural people this year by using the “Muslim infiltrator” scare tactic. In 2019, the right-wing party only won four of the 18 seats in Santhal Pargana. Earlier this year, in the parliamentary elections, the BJP only won one of the three seats from the area and failed to win the two seats set aside for native people.

India’s affirmative action program reserves some seats in the state assembly and parliament for historically disadvantaged groups. These groups include dozens of tribes and lower-caste people. The scheme also extends these types of restrictions to government jobs and state-run schools.

Pakur is in the northeastern part of Jharkhand, just 32 miles (50 km) from the border with Bangladesh. It also borders the predominantly Muslim Murshidabad area in the state of West Bengal, which is right next door. Bangladesh and West Bengal both speak Bengali, which is a major South Asian language. This is why most people in Santhal Pargana speak it.

People in India often hear about the fear of a Bangladeshi infiltrator, particularly since Modi took office in 2014 with a goal of empowering the Hindu majority. Initially, they portrayed the Rohingya refugees from Myanmar and Bangladesh in a negative light. This turned into a larger campaign against Muslims in northeast India, especially in the state of Assam, which is home to millions of Bengali-speaking Muslims.

The BJP and its partners have been running the “Muslim infiltrator” campaign for decades in Assam, where a third of the people are Muslim. They say that Muslims came to the country from Bangladesh “illegally,” changed the state’s population, and took over jobs and land.

Racist campaigns demanding the loss of all civil rights, imprisonment, or repatriation to Bangladesh have intensified since the BJP-led alliance’s first victory in Assam in 2016. Since then, the government has labeled thousands of Muslims as “doubtful voters” and placed dozens in holding centers exclusively for “illegal” Muslims.

Jharkhand’s Muslims now fear the introduction of politics to their state. The BJP named Himanta Biswa Sarma, the Head of State for Assam, as the election supervisor for Jharkhand before the vote. Conservative lawmaker Sarma, 55, faces accusations of making racist comments and enacting laws that harm Muslims. At a number of his campaign events in Jharkhand, Sarma said that his party would find “the illegals” and “push them to Bangladesh,” just like he says he did in Assam.

If the BJP wins, Sarma also said that he would bring the controversial National Register of Citizens (NRC) to Jharkhand. India’s Supreme Court first ordered the NRC in 2013, with the aim of identifying illegal immigrants in India and returning them to their home countries. Because of the NRC drive in 2019, Sarma’s government got rid of almost two million people from the citizenship list. Approximately half of those individuals were Hindus. Although the BJP said it would use the NRC nationwide, it has only done so in some areas.

Lawyer Shadab Ansari from Jharkhand told Al Jazeera, “The country knows that the final draft of Assam’s NRC left out 900,000 Hindus and 700,000 Muslims.” He also said that these kinds of campaigns won’t work in a state where tribalism is the norm.

Most experts view the NRC as an additional policy that complements the controversial citizenship law that the Modi government passed in 2019 and began implementing earlier this year. The Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA) sparked protests across the country due to perceived bias against Muslims. The CAA makes it easier for “persecuted” Hindus, Parsis, Sikhs, Buddhists, Jains, and Christians who came to India before December 31, 2014 from Muslim-majority Afghanistan, Bangladesh, and Pakistan to become Indian citizens.

Pratul Shahdev, a spokeswoman for the BJP, said that the party is not using the “Bangladeshi infiltrator” problem as an election issue. He said, “We raised this years ago and will again.”

Shahdev spoke about the BJP’s claim that not all Muslims from Santhal are infiltrators. “We are only asking questions about Bangladeshi Muslims who have come into Jharkhand illegally,” he said.

The people who came in are abusing the rights of local Muslims by becoming citizens of the country and taking advantage of different programs run by the government to help minorities. “They are marrying tribal women and taking over tribal people’s land,” he said, but he didn’t give any proof to back up his claim.