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The Bharatiya Janata Party’s (BJP) seismic breakthrough in West Bengal represented the cold, calculated engineering of a new political psychology that involved recasting Bangladesh – historically the cultural sibling of the Bengali imagination – as a visceral symbol of demographic dread and religious fragility.

In doing so, successfully, the saffron party did more than outmanoeuvre the Trinamool Congress (TMC). It redrew the state’s emotional geography because the ballot box essentially became a referendum on a civilisational anxiety of what Hindu voters imagined Bengal might become.

For decades, the state’s political soil proved inhospitable to the BJP’s Hindutva seed, protected by a canopy of Left universalism and linguistic chauvinism coupled with a syncretic ethos that viewed communal friction as a plebeian North Indian import. Bangladesh collapsed that exceptionalism. More accurately, the BJP ensured it did.

To the eyes of the Indian establishment and the Indian media, the 2024 implosion of Sheikh Hasina’s regime created an ensuing ‘vacuum’ in Dhaka. This idea was bolstered by the grim dispatches of attacks on Hindu minorities. Those provided the perfect crucible. The BJP positioned itself as the sole........

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