The rapid development of Rajarhat, West Bengal into a ‘global city’ has attracted both skilled and unskilled migrants. Amidst economic precarity and social polarisation, ethnicity-based identity politics are easily weaponised by a section of the Bengali population, in order to deflect public attention away from the political economy and towards those perceived as ‘outsiders’ – an empty signifier that refers to ethnic, religious and linguistic minorities and financially weaker migrants. The ‘insider’ embodies a profound sense of belonging to an imagined Bengali community, whilst the ‘outsider’ is perceived as a threat to Bengali culture and livelihood. Through a social media analysis of comments and videos posted on the Facebook page of Banglapokkho, a civil society organisation in West Bengal that advocates for ‘putting Bengalis first’, this article examines how an insider/outsider impulse unfolds as a symptom of fissures in community relations. The authors argue that what has transpired in Rajarhat between Bengalis and non-Bengalis, through a narrative of ‘reclamation’ and its ethnolinguistic framing, is a function of a specific economic order shaped by the global flows of capital and the ensuing economic precarity, which must be understood with reference to the intersectionality of class and ethnicity.
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19.
The conflation of economic precarity with racial/ethnic anxieties is a staple of contemporary conservative right-wing politics across the globe. For instance, this phenomenon has been discussed in the context of Germany and the Czech Republic in T. Hilmar, “Restoring Economic Pride? How Right-wing Populists Moralize Economic Change,” Populism and the Past 31, no. 2 (2022): 291–305; in the context of Poland in A. Bartosz, Right-Wing Politics in Poland: Identity, Economy, and Populism (Warsaw: University of Warsaw Press, 2019); and in the context of Hungary in A. Batory, “The Rise of Right-wing Populism in Hungary: A Study of Economic and Political Narratives,” Journal of Political Ideologies 21, no. 2 (2016): 181–99.
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Readers may consult Hardgrove’s ethnographic study of Marwari identity in public life as framed by the Bengali experience to get a sense of how the social relations between the Bengali and Marwari communities in Kolkata have evolved over the decades. See A. Hardgrove, Community and Public Culture: The Marwaris in Calcutta, c. 1897–1997 (New York: Columbia University Press, 2004), 27.
24.
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For discussions on the resurgence of Hindu nationalism in contemporary India, see C. Jaffrelot, The Hindu Nationalist Movement and Indian Politics: 1925 to the 1990s (New York: Columbia University Press, 1999) and T. B. Hansen, The Saffron Wave: Democracy and Hindu Nationalism in Modern India (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1999) among others. The rise of Hindu nationalism, both scholars argue, cannot be untethered from the spread of Hindi imperialism. Relatedly, BJP’s problematic use of the term ‘infiltrator’ to signify Muslim immigrants from Bangladesh, coupled with their push for the National Register of Citizenship (NRC) as a database of ‘legitimate’ Indians, has mobilised public sentiments against ‘outsiders’.
26.
Historically, many unskilled and semi-skilled migrants from rural Bihar have settled in neighbouring West Bengal in search of better job opportunities, particularly in construction, rickshaw pulling, domestic work and factory labour. Kolkata and other urban centres in West Bengal offer more employment in these sectors compared to rural Bihar.
27.
Banglapokkho does not define a ‘Bengali’. Oblivious to the intersectionality of class, caste and gender, they posit ‘Bengali’ as a totalising and uniform identificatory category formed upon claims of persecution by ‘outsiders’.
28.
M. Weiner, Sons of the Soil: Migration and Ethnic Conflict in India (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1978), 277.
29.
Our rationale for studying discourses on Facebook is twofold. Firstly, with the increasing internet penetration of India, digital activism has acquired new meanings and contingencies. Secondly, Banglapokkho has a very active Facebook presence for public outreach. Today, the internet is imagined mainly in territorial terms, as indicated by using spatial metaphors such as websites, maps, navigation, etc. See M. Graham, “Geography/Internet: Ethereal Alternate Dimensions of Cyberspace or Grounded Augmented Realities?” The Geographical Journal 179, no. 2 (2013): 177–82.
30.
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33.
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34.
‘Joy Bangla’ is Banglapokkho’s slogan, which translates to ‘hail to Bengali/Bengal’. Hashtags are essential search terms because they serve as ‘a coalescing apparatus that helps converge meandering ideas into one rubric’ and are ‘exceedingly instrumental in how “imagined communities” fashion their identities online’; see A. Ray, “Pan-Hindutva and the Discursive Practices of Digital (Counter)Publics around #SupportCAA,” Nationalism and Ethnic Politics 28, no. 1 (2021): 92–104 (94).
35.
The number of comments on these posts ranged from forty-eight to ninety. On average, these posts garnered 73.22 comments each. We have set forty-eight as our benchmark, for the tenth post, in descending order of comments, garnered only twenty-eight comments, which is significantly lower than the average. The number of comments for a post is an important metric because it indicates public outreach; however, it is crucial to remember that ‘it is impossible to gain a comprehensive picture of everything that is available online, much less to construct a representative sample of it’; see S. Banaji and D. Buckingham, The Civic Web: Young People, the Internet, and Civic Participation (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2013), 15.
36.
The authors have translated the video commentaries from Bengali into English. The Facebook comments cited in the piece originally appear in Bengali, English and Bengali transliteration (in Roman scripts). For comments in Bengali and Bengali transliteration, the authors have translated them into English.
37.
Established in 1976, Noida, located in the northern Indian state of Uttar Pradesh, adjacent to New Delhi, has been developed into a modern industrial and urban centre to support the rapid growth of the National Capital Region (NCR). It is now known for its modern infrastructure, including wide roads, parks, residential complexes and numerous IT and business parks.
38.
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41.
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43.
Ahmed, “Affective Economies,” 117–39; Ahmed, The Cultural Politics of Emotion.
44.
At various points, the Goa government has rendered protectionism to the local transport operators by restricting or outright banning the operation of Ola and Uber across the state. In collaboration with a private company, in 2018, it introduced its own app-based taxi service to keep the business within the local community. Organised as a class, local drivers were an important stakeholder in this move.
45.
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