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Mumbai/Nagpur: In April this year, days before Nandigram in West Bengal went to polls, Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) leader and the face of the party’s campaign in West Bengal, Suvendu Adhikari travelled to the constituency.

Speaking to voters, he rattled off facts.

Thirty thousand locals from Nandigram, he said, worked as migrant workers in different states of India. Then, he went on to spell out the Muslims among them.

“There are over 30,000 migrant workers…in Gujarat, 1,100 Muslim men from Nandigram reside. In Odisha, 800 Muslim men reside. In Maharashtra, 3,300 Muslim young men reside. Whose government is in Odisha? Whose government in Maharashtra? Whose government in Gujarat?” he asked.

Singling out Muslims, he issued a warning. “Don’t make a mistake! Mend your ways… so that there are no problems after May 4 (the day of counting). You can give threatening looks and say ‘Joy Bangla’, but I am writing down everything,” he was quoted by The Times Of India as saying. Adhikari ended up winning the seat by 9,665 votes.

Such rhetoric by Adhikari isn’t an exception.

Over the last two years, as the BJP tried to make deeper inroads into West Bengal, culminating in its historic win on May 4, Adhikari led from the front and emerged as the face of the party. It was little surprise, therefore, that Adhikari has been sworn in as the BJP’s first chief minister in the state.

But an analysis of Adhikari’s public rhetoric, since he switched over to the BJP from the Trinamool Congress (TMC) in December 2020, shows a systematic pattern of targeting the state’s Muslim population – inciting hate against them, peddling conspiracy theories and advocating their social boycott.

The Wire went through Adhikari’s publicly available statements and speeches between 2021 and 2026 by relying on news reports and his social media posts, and found a clear pattern of communally-charged and divisive remarks, explicitly backing violence against Muslims. The findings raise concerns over Adhikari’s elevation as the chief minister of a state which has the second largest proportion of Muslims in the country, at 27%, second only to  Assam which has 34%.

Adhikari has courted controversy for some of his remarks. In December last year, he called for India’s “100 crore Hindus” to teach a Gaza-like “lesson”, while on May 5, a day after he won the polls, he called Muslims “kattarwadi” and said he would work “for the Hindus of Nandigram” since, according to him, the entire Muslim vote went to the TMC. He did not reveal the source of this information, since the Election Commission of India (ECI) does not reveal religion-wise voting data.

However, The Wire’s documentation shows that these remarks were a part of a pattern of rhetoric that Adhikari has maintained, in his quest to end the TMC’s dominance in the state.

The Wire has reached out to the BJP’s chief spokesperson and media in-charge Anil Baluni through email for a response. The Wire also reached out to Adhikari through email for a response.  This article will be updated when a response is received.

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