Sangh's Unfinished Dream of “Banga”

There is something uniquely Indian about our political imagination. We can discuss inflation in the morning, nuclear war in the afternoon, and by evening somebody is redrawing the map of the subcontinent over tea and samosas.

The latest fantasy drifting through nationalist drawing rooms is the grand slogan: “Ang, Kalinga, Banga.” It sounds less like a geopolitical doctrine and more like an ancient ayurvedic prescription. But do not underestimate the emotional power of old words in a civilization that remembers epics better than budget speeches.

“Ang” is Bihar in its ancient costume. “Kalinga” is Odisha before modern spelling arrived. And “Banga,” of course, is Bengal — not merely the present-day West Bengal, but the entire cultural landmass stretching into Bangladesh. The slogan now circulates among enthusiastic supporters of the Bharatiya Janata Party and its ideological uncle, the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, as proof that eastern India is finally returning to the nationalist fold.

But here is the awkward geographical problem. What exactly is “Banga” if most of Bengal lies outside India?

One cannot celebrate the conquest of Bengal while politely ignoring that the larger half sits across the border carrying a Bangladeshi passport. That is rather like announcing one has inherited the family mansion when one only owns the balcony.

This is where history enters, wearing its usual bloodstained kurta.

The Partition of 1947 was not merely an administrative exercise; it was the largest human uprooting in recorded history. Bengal was cut in two with the casual brutality of a colonial butcher dividing meat. One side remained in India. The other became East Pakistan and later Bangladesh. Millions crossed borders carrying trunks, gods, memories and bitterness.

To Hindu nationalists, this division remains unfinished business.

They invoke Syama Prasad Mukherjee with near-scriptural reverence. In their telling, Mukherjee prevented all of Bengal from sliding into Pakistan while Jawaharlal Nehru was busy ironing his achkan for the prime ministership. This may be unfair to Nehru, but fairness has never survived long in ideological storytelling.

The emotional engine behind this politics is not merely territory. It is fear.

For years, critics of Mamata Banerjee accused her government of treating illegal migration as a renewable electoral resource. In nationalist rhetoric, the Bengal border became less a frontier and more an open railway platform where infiltrators wandered in, collected identity cards, voted enthusiastically, and vanished into the republic like magicians at a village fair.

Every communal disturbance in Bangladesh deepened these anxieties. Whenever Islamist mobs attacked Hindu minorities there, many Bengali Hindus in India saw not a foreign tragedy but a preview trailer. Organizations such as Jamaat-e-Islami became symbols of a larger civilizational threat in this narrative.

And now comes the seductive part.

Some nationalist thinkers quietly believe that if political influence can reshape West Bengal, one day cultural gravity might reshape Bangladesh itself. Not through tanks and air strikes — Indians prefer emotional annexation to military efficiency — but through demography, economics, culture and ideological confidence.

Of course, polite society dismisses such talk as fantasy. But then, Indian politics has a mischievous habit of converting absurdity into inevitability. Ten years ago, the idea of the BJP dominating Bengal was treated as a joke fit for late-night whisky sessions. Today it is discussed by television anchors with the seriousness usually reserved for monsoon forecasts.

Nations survive on myths as much as constitutions. America has its frontier dream. China has civilizational continuity. India has the permanent conviction that history made a clerical error in 1947.

Whether Bengal will ever be emotionally or politically reunited is another matter entirely. Geography is stubborn. Borders, once soaked in blood, do not dissolve because television panelists become sentimental.

Still, one must admire the scale of Indian political ambition. In Europe, politicians struggle to unite coalition partners for six months. In South Asia, men are still trying to reunite civilizations lost eighty years ago.

And they say Indians lack long-term vision.