Check BB’s personal anecdote on the Northeast.
As mentioned, the Special Intensive Revision of electoral rolls in West Bengal has removed 9.1 million names, 2.7 million of them under contested adjudication. The argument has compressed itself into two bad positions. Either every deletion is disenfranchisement, or every deletion is a Bangladeshi caught. Neither is true, and the census of the last hundred years tells a more specific story than either side wants.
The received wisdom on Northeast India collapses into one sentence: Bangladeshi Muslims are flooding across the border. The received wisdom is partly wrong and mostly incomplete. A narrower reading of the census, focused on the actual border districts, tells a stranger story. There are two demographic colonisations in eastern India, not one. They run in opposite religious directions, and Indian statecraft has treated them as opposites: one ratified, one criminalised.
Tripura: the Hindu Bengali takeover
Tripura*: 1951: 71% Hindu, 7% Muslim (with ~21% still counted under tribal religions separately).
Today: 83% Hindu, 9% Muslim.
In 1941, tribals were 50% of Tripura. By 2011, 32%. Partition and the 1971 war did the rest.
The population that replaced the Kokborok, Reang, and Jamatia is Bengali Hindu, not Muslim. Tripura’s Muslim share today is 9%, below the all-India average. The Northeast state most transformed by Partition and 1971 is the one that became a Hindu Bengali colony.
South Tripura district is the cleanest data point. The ST share there is 17%. The Bengali Hindu majority there is overwhelmingly composed of descendants of refugees who crossed between 1947 and 1971.
*Note on Tripura: the Hindu figure jumped partly because tribals were reclassified as Hindu between 1951 and 1971 in the census. Real Hindu Bengali influx adds on top of that statistical shift.
Assam border districts: the Muslim Bengali case
Assam: 1951: 72% Hindu, 25% Muslim.
Today: 61% Hindu, 34% Muslim. Continue reading Two Colonisations, One Border: What the Data Actually Says About Bengal’s Post-1971 Demographic Story
