Kolkata, April 10 For years, the BJP’s relationship with the Matua refugees in Bengal was based on a single promise: if you support the party, we will resolve the long-standing uncertainty about your citizenship.
However, the final electoral rolls following the Special Intensive Revision (SIR) have turned that promise into the BJP’s biggest vulnerability.
The deletion of lakhs of names from the Matua community in the Nadia and North 24 Parganas districts has signaled the first signs of political drift within the refugee Hindu belt, which has been central to the BJP’s expansion in Bengal since 2019.
What has shaken the party is not just the scale of the deletions, but the specific areas most affected.
These included Bongaon, Bagdah, Gaighata, Swarupnagar, Ranaghat, and Krishnanagar, where the BJP had built a seemingly solid social base around the promise of citizenship under the Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA).
The political conversation in these areas has significantly changed. Until a few months ago, the BJP was urging Matua voters to support them, hoping that the CAA would finally resolve decades of uncertainty about identity and belonging.
Now, many of these voters are asking why, after years of supporting the BJP on the promise of citizenship, they are being “forced to prove that they belong here.”
Ashok Mondal of Gaighata stated, “After voting on the promise of citizenship for years, I have lost my voting rights. If my name is not on the voter list, what is the guarantee that tomorrow I will not be told I do not belong here?”
The first signs of voter base erosion are already visible. In Boyra village of Bagdah, nearly 50 Matua families have moved from the BJP to the TMC after finding their names missing from the rolls.
“We voted for the BJP because they said they would end all this. Instead, we have lost our voting rights too,” said one villager who recently joined the TMC.
The Matua vote is spread across nearly 55 assembly constituencies in Nadia, North 24 Parganas, and parts of north Bengal. The community has often been a key factor in electoral outcomes in south Bengal.
BJP insiders privately admit that Matua and refugee-dominated constituencies contributed more than half of their 77 seats in the 2021 elections.
This is why the final electoral rolls have left the BJP concerned.
“If the Matua vote is disrupted, we will suffer because this is our core social base. Our challenge now is to retain the voters who remain on the rolls and convince others that their names will be restored,” a BJP leader from Bongaon told
