Prime Minister Narendra Modi addresses a public meeting, in Malda, West Bengal.
Credit: PTI Photo
Kolkata: Once the Bharatiya Janata Party is voted to power in West Bengal, a crackdown on illegal migrants sneaking into the state from across the India-Bangladesh border, Prime Minister Narendra Modi said on Saturday, accusing the ruling Trinamool Congress of facilitating the infiltrators settle down in the state and thus of altering the demography.
Modi on Saturday flagged off the country’s first Vande Bharat sleeper train from Malda Town Railway Station. The train will operate between Howrah in West Bengal and Kamakhya in Assam. The prime minister also virtually flagged off four Amrit Bharat Express trains connecting New Jalpaiguri and Alipurduar in West Bengal with Nagercoil and Tiruchirappalli in Tamil Nadu, as well as with SMVT Bengaluru in Karnataka and Mumbai (Panvel) in Maharashtra, respectively. With the next assembly elections in West Bengal likely to take place by April-May this year, the prime minister unveiled rail and road infrastructure projects worth Rs 3250 crore, mostly in and around North Bengal, a stronghold of the BJP.
“Even the developed nations, which have no dearth of resources, are deporting illegal migrants. West Bengal, too, must be freed of illegal migrants,” Modi said at a BJP rally in Malda, adding: “But the TMC leaders have been settling the illegal migrants in West Bengal and turning them into voters for their own vested political interests.”
He called the TMC government “irresponsible” and “cruel” and accused Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee’s party of rampant corruption and of blocking the implementation of the welfare schemes rolled out by the Union Government.
The prime minister said that illegal migration from across India’s borders with Bangladesh into West Bengal could not be stopped as long as the TMC government, led by Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee, would not be ousted from power in the state. He also said that a large-scale operation to detect and deport the illegal migrants from West Bengal would commence as soon as the BJP government would come to power in the state.
Modi used his first speech of the year in poll-bound West Bengal to send out the message that unabated illegal migration from Bangladesh to India and the TMC government’s alleged support for it would be the main poll plank of the BJP in the assembly elections in the state.
Home Minister Amit Shah had spent the last two days of 2025 in Kolkata to review the BJP’s preparation for the polls in West Bengal. He had also alleged that the TMC government had put in peril the national security by encouraging illegal migration from Bangladesh to India.
The BJP top brass started harping on the issue of illegal migration even as the Special Intensive Revision of the electoral rolls in West Bengal triggered protests from the ruling TMC.
The saffron party accused Mamata Banerjee’s party of opposing the revision of the electoral rolls to protect its vote bank of the Muslim migrants who allegedly settled in West Bengal after illegally sneaking into India from neighbouring Bangladesh.
Modi, however, on Saturday also sought to allay the concerns among the Matuas over the prospects of losing voting rights due to the SIR of the electoral rolls.
“The refugees of the Matua Namasudra community have come here to escape religious persecution in the neighbouring country, and they have nothing to fear,” the prime minister said, adding that his government had provided complete security to the refugees by enacting the Citizenship Amendment Act in 2019.
The Matuas are a religious sect born out of a reformist movement in the early 19th century and comprising some lower castes, which had then been treated as untouchables by the upper caste Hindus of undivided Bengal. The community grew in size in West Bengal, as many of them migrated from the erstwhile East Pakistan after partition and continued to do so even after the creation of Bangladesh in 1971. They now account for nearly 17% of the population of West Bengal and can influence the poll results in 40-45 of the total 294 assembly constituencies in the State.
The SIR of the electoral rolls, however, triggered fear among the Matuas. The BJP, which has been competing with the TMC to expand its support base within the community, is organising camps to allay the concerns among the members of the community over the implications of the SIR on their citizenship status. Union minister Shantanu Thakur, a leader of the community and a BJP MP, recently said that even if the names of some Matuas were deleted from the voter list due to the SIR, their names would be added later as they could obtain the citizenship of India, taking advantage of the CAA of 2019.
Modi not only referred to the BJP’s victory in the state assembly elections in Bihar in November 2025 but also highlighted the party’s success in the civic elections in Mumbai and the rest of Maharashtra, as well as in the mayoral elections in Thiruvananthapuram. “In places where the BJP was long targeted by misinformation, public support is now visible. The enthusiasm here today gives me confidence that (West) Bengal, too, will back the BJP decisively in the coming elections,” said the prime minister, adding: “Today, I want to tell every BJP worker that the days of TMC's hooliganism are now numbered”.