Parties court Bengal’s Matuas as citizenship anxieties cloud key vote
The Statesman | 28 April 2026
As West Bengal heads for the final phase of polls on Wednesday, the ruling Trinamool Congress (TMC) and challenger Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) are placing calculated bets on one single community, which both see as pivotal to the make-or-break game – the roughly three million-strong Matuas concentrated in villages along the border with Bangladesh.
While Prime Minister Narendra Modi visited Thakurnagar in North 24 Parganas district on Sunday to pray at the Matua community’s main temple in Thakurbari, Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee began wooing the Matua voters early in November last year, when she led a 3 km long walk from Bongaon to Thakurnagar.
Since then, TMC cadres have fanned out into what were hitherto BJP strongholds, much to the alarm of the right-wing party’s workers. “The Matua community can decide which way the vote will go in large parts of South Bengal,” pointed out Dilip Biswas, 69, who came over to India in 1965 from Faridpur district of East Pakistan.
The BJP’s breakthrough in West Bengal in the 2019 general election, and its subsequent performance in 2024, when it secured victories in around 90 assembly segments and close to 39 per cent of the vote, owed much to support from this marginalised community, which can directly decide the results in over 50 assembly constituencies or nearly a fifth of the West Bengal assembly.
The Matua clusters of villages and suburban towns are spread over North 24 Parganas and Nadia districts, with smaller concentrations in South 24 Parganas and beyond. Originating among the Namashudra community, a Scheduled Caste group, they follow a reformist Vaishnavite tradition rooted in the teachings of 19th-century reformer Harichand Thakur.
While the sect’s original centre lies in Orakandi, now in Bangladesh, its Indian spiritual hub has relocated to Thakurnagar, a township set in verdant green surroundings some 70 kms away from Kolkata and close to the international border.
Originally a part of Bangladesh’s Jessore district, the Radcliffe Line threw Bongaon and Gaighata, which have the largest concentrations of the Matua sect, into India, leading to Thakurnagar being set up between the two areas.
Modi, perhaps realising how important the Matuas were to cracking the Bengal political code, had, in March 2021, become the first Indian Prime Minister to visit Orakandi during a state visit to Bangladesh, just ahead of assembly polls in West Bengal.
The problem for the BJP this time round is the SIR which has affected some 9.1 million voters all over the state. It has also hit the Matuas and there is a growing sense of unease about it. Shantanu Thakur, a junior minister in the central government, has been busy trying to assuage feelings, promising that the Citizenship Amendment Act 2019 will be used to provide full citizenship to those Matuas who may face any such issues.
Across Bongaon and Gaighata, temporary camps have sprung up to guide residents through the process of applying for citizenship, reflecting a quiet but determined mobilisation on the ground. In Thakurnagar, the spiritual centre of the Matua community, one such help desk has been established by the All India Matua Mahasangha at Thakur’s house.
However, most Matuas are scared of going through the CAA process even if they have migrated after March 1971, the cut-off date for refugees coming from East Pakistan to India, for being automatically considered Indian citizens.
“The documents required for a CAA application are hard to obtain. Many are asking why they should enter this process at all when most Matuas already possess voter IDs and Aadhaar cards, why should they get into this process, as also whether this will make all the documents they already have legally challengeable?” asked Biswas, 69.
Since the Citizenship Amendment Act rules were notified in March 2024, around 112,000 applications have been filed across West Bengal, but only about 15,000 applicants have so far been granted citizenship.
The CAA has promised Indian citizenship to Hindu, Sikh, Buddhist and Christian refugees who had to cross over to India from neighbouring South Asian countries because of religious persecution, with a 2014 cut-off date.
Biswas pointed out that in Assam, those who have been disenfranchised or put in detention camps after being suspected of being foreigners were overwhelmingly Hindu Bengalis, many from the Namashudra caste to which most Matuas belong.
The Matua community itself was a house divided even before CAA or SIR. One faction aligns with Thakur and the BJP; another follows Mamata Bala Thakur of the Trinamool Congress.
Their rivalry reflects a broader contest over the legacy of the late matriarch Binapani Devi, known as “Boro Ma”, whose influence once unified the community. Shantanu Thakur is her grandson, while Mamata Bala Thakur is her daughter-in-law.
“West Bengal has largely been spared the overt caste-based politics seen in much of north India, but in recent decades the Matua community has emerged as a significant political force,” said Prof Sabyasahi Basu Roy Chowdhury, a noted political scientist and former vice chancellor of the Rabindra Bharati University.
Since independence, caste-based politics have had little play in West Bengal except in the choice of candidates, partly as a result of Bengal’s 19th-century renaissance and partly because industrialisation and partition helped break caste barriers by forcing people to live cheek by jowl instead of caste-based villages.
“At the beginning of this century, sections of the Matua community, some of whom faced police harassment while seeking official documents or over their continued cross-border ties, began mobilising around demands for citizenship rights. The movement was initially overlooked by political parties, before they later rallied to the cause and sought to champion it,” explained Samata Biswas, who researches migration trends at the Calcutta Research Group.