Opinion: Partition, caste and citizenship - The Matua story and BJP’s efforts to woo them

Debates concerning the Citizenship Amendment Act, 2019 (CAA), and the Citizenship Amendment Rules, 2024 (CAR) have brought the Matua-Namasudra community of West Bengal into prominence. Purportedly, the community will be a major beneficiary of the CAA. In the 2019 national elections and 2021 Assembly elections, the group overwhelmingly voted for the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP). And right now, a large part of the electoral politics about the CAA revolves around this community. Hence, to decode the legal and political logic of the CAA, it is important to put into perspective the complex interconnection between the history and politics of the Matua movement and the curious evolution of the legal citizenship regime in post-colonial India.

Tracing Matua genealogy

Matua is an anti-Brahmanical sect which emerged in the 1870s in eastern Bengal among the lower caste Namasudras, as a protest movement against upper caste hegemony. The sect was founded by Harichand Thakur (1812-1878) and was later organised and consolidated by his son Guruchand Thakur (1846-1937).

According to historian Sekhar Bandyopadhyay, apart from rejecting caste, the original Matua philosophy as propounded by Harichand Thakur offered a powerful critique of classical Vedic Hinduism by negating key ideas like Guruvaad, Avatarvaad, and the practice of worshipping multiple deities. Later, however, the sect underwent a great degree of Hinduisation, embracing its various practices and rituals. Many members of the sect also started to imagine Harichand Thakur as an incarnation of God Vishnu and Guruchand Thakur as an incarnation of God Shiva.

Nevertheless, it retained an intense anti-Brahmanical and anti-caste character. The Namasudras led by Guruchand Thakur even kept away from the mainstream nationalist movement as it was perceived as a largely Brahmin endeavour to secure Brahmin interests. Moreover, a radical anti-caste and Ambedkarite discourse, a product of a growing radical Dalit literary movement, also gained currency among certain sections inclined to treat the Matua faith as a separate religion.

Therefore, many observers find the BJP’s growing traction among the Matuas a puzzling, albeit temporary, anomaly. However, the answer to this puzzle partly lies in the other part of the Matua story, which pertains to the dilemma spawned by the partition of India.

Partition and the caste-citizenship-refugee triangle

The partition of India led to the inclusion of all Namasudra-dominated districts into East Pakistan (later Bangladesh). The family of Harichand Thakur migrated to West Bengal and Pramatha Ranjan Thakur, the grandson of Guruchand Thakur, established the sect’s headquarters at Thakurnagar in North 24 Parganas.

However, an overwhelmingly large number of Namasudras, mostly cultivators and manual labourers, unlike their relatively skilled, educated, socially connected, and land-owning upper caste counterparts, could not migrate in the immediate aftermath of partition, fearing inability to find livelihood on the other side of the border. A rapidly deteriorating communal situation, caused by riots in Khulna in December 1949, sparked off a Namasudra migration, which happened in waves throughout the following decades on the heels of major communal disturbances.

The largest influx of Bengali refugees happened in 1970-71 during the Bangladesh Liberation War. Another reason for this exodus was the land-grabbing of Hindu peasants through Enemy/Vested property law. This legislation first came into effect in 1965 in Pakistan as the Enemy Property Act and was renamed in 1974 in Bangladesh. It continued till 2001 when the Restoration of Vested Property Act was enacted. However, little has been achieved concerning the return of confiscated properties to the original owners due to legal loopholes and the involvement of the ruling Awami League politicians in land-grabbing.

While migration continued, the legal qualifications for citizenship became more and more stringent and the rehabilitation policy became more and more unfavourable. Per Article 6 of the Constitution, those who migrated from Pakistan by July 19, 1948, automatically became citizens. The upper caste East Bengalis, because of early migration, faced no issues with citizenship. They found settlements in Calcutta and its suburbs, often in squatter colonies, with the government turning a blind eye.

As the Namasudras migrated afterwards, they could not automatically acquire citizenship. Many of them were resettled outside West Bengal, in the rocky plateau of Dandakaranya and Andamans, on grounds of limited availability of land and resources in the state. Further, the government denied all relief and rehabilitation assistance to those who migrated between April 1958 and December 1963. Later, those migrating between January 1964 and March 1971 were made eligible for rehabilitation, conditional on agreeing to resettle outside West Bengal.

Further, faced with a massive refugee crisis in the wake of the Bangladesh Liberation War in 1970-71, the government of India in November 1971 decided not to grant citizenship to those who had crossed over from East Bengal starting March 25, 1971. This reduced the post-1971 migrants to permanent refugees by making them ineligible for citizenship. However, in due course, many managed to acquire government documents like PAN, voter ID, and Aadhaar cards, effectively becoming de facto citizens.

But the 2003 amendment to the Citizenship Act created additional difficulties for them, by categorising all migrants without valid travel documents like passports and visas as illegal migrants. Since then, Namasudra refugees have regularly been suspected of being “Bangladeshis” or illegal infiltrators during registration for the electoral rolls and issuance of documents like passports and caste certificates.

Thus, in practice, citizenship and refugee policies have ended up providing far more favourable treatment to the upper castes. These policies have been accused of being motivated by the casteist intention of preventing the political regrouping of the numerically significant Namasudra community in post-colonial West Bengal. Still, caste-based mobilisation did not happen until the last years of the Left Rule.

The Matua Mahasangha was re-launched in 1986 by Pramatha Ranjan Thakur, and it mainly focused on social and religious activities to reignite a sense of common identity among members of the Namasudra community. Staying away from mainstream politics, it recruited members, organised religious gatherings, and published books, pamphlets and magazines. The political effects of these efforts became evident when agitations against the Citizenship Amendment Act, 2003, became an unavoidable imperative for the community.

It started as a hunger strike in Thakurnagar in 2004, but it picked up pace only on the eve of the 2009 national elections. The decline of the non-identitarian class politics of the Left Front since the 2008 Panchayat elections created greater scope for caste-based mobilisation. At the same time, the emergence of the Trinamool Congress (TMC) as a viable non-left political alternative provided the Matuas an opportunity to articulate their identitarian demands through mainstream political channels.

TMC vs BJP: Contrasting models of mobilisation

A large section of the Matuas backed the TMC in the 2011 and 2016 Assembly elections, lured by Mamata Banerjee’s outreach attempts. The TMC attempted to mobilise Matua support by pandering to the sentiments of the community through symbolic initiatives such as the announcement of a proposal to set up Harichand-Guruchand University, conferment of Bengal’s highest civilian award — the Banga Vibhushan — on Matua matriarch and spiritual head, late Boroma Binapani Devi, and the acceptance by Mamata Banerjee of the membership and patronage of the Matua Mahasangha.

However, being a regional party, the TMC could not address the central demand of the Matuas concerning citizenship and gradually lost out to the BJP. The BJP soon outwitted the TMC by working out an effective political strategy, exclusively designed for mobilising the Namasudras. It initiated a “politics of memory”, which under the larger Hindutva blueprint set out to mobilise them not as a lower caste group, but as a group of displaced Hindus by appealing to their collective experience of religious persecution. The CAA was the primary vehicle of this “politics of memory”; it was not just a legislative act, but also a potent political narrative, emphasising religious persecution of Hindu Dalits in an attempt to reconcile caste politics with Hindu nationalism.

New dilemmas and uncertainties

The recent notification of the CAR is believed to have been motivated by the objective of consolidating Matua support in favour of the BJP. It created initial jubilation, which quickly evaporated once various complications surrounding the application process for citizenship became evident. The main problem relates to the absence of documents issued by the government of Pakistan/Bangladesh in support of an applicant’s nationality. The victims of communal violence could not bring such documents and many of those who could, later destroyed them to evade the suspicion of being Bangladeshis.

Further, it is illogical to assume that the present generation descendants of the past migrants have preserved these documents. Many are also afraid that declaration of their original nationality through an affidavit, a requirement of the application process, will legally render them foreigners in case of rejection of the application.

Currently, it appears that the CAR has created fresh dilemmas for the BJP, complicating its smooth-sailing Matua outreach. It is true that BJP’s “politics of memory” has been able to develop many ideological Matua voters, for whom the CAA is not only about gaining citizenship but also about halting Muslim infiltration from Bangladesh. Still, unlike the elections of the recent past, the party can’t be certain of overwhelming Matua support in the upcoming elections. A lot will depend on the efforts of the local BJP leaders to quell the anxieties created by the CAR.

(Ayan Guha is a British Academy International Fellow, School of Global Studies, University of Sussex. He is the author of the book ‘The Curious Trajectory of Caste in West Bengal Politics: Chronicling Continuity and Change’)