On 3 August, Amit Malviya, BJP IT cell chief and Bengal minder, posted his defence of the Delhi Police on X: ‘The official language of Bangladesh is not only phonologically different, but also includes dialects like Sylheti that are nearly incomprehensible to Indian Bengalis.

‘There is, in fact, no language called “Bengali” that neatly covers all these variants. “Bengali” denotes ethnicity, not linguistic uniformity. So, when the Delhi Police uses “Bangladeshi language”, it is shorthand for the linguistic markers used to profile illegal immigrants from Bangladesh — not a commentary on Bengali as spoken in West Bengal.’

Malviya’s tweet, particularly his reference to Sylheti, spread the conflagration to the North-East, angering leaders in Assam’s Barak Valley, home to a large Sylheti-speaking population. Murmurs of annoyance were heard from Tripura and Meghalaya as well.

According to TMC Rajya Sabha member Sushmita Dev, “It has become clear that the BJP’s top leadership has no clue about the history of the Bengali and Sylheti languages spoken by millions of Indians.” She also said Assam chief minister Himanta Biswa Sarma’s remark — that identifying Bangladeshis would be easier if people declared Bengali as their mother tongue — was “racial profiling aimed at upcoming elections in Assam and West Bengal”.

A defensive BJP argued that Malviya’s remark was misinterpreted. “We are not anti-Bengali. Our stand is ‘detect and deport’. Bangladeshis speak in Bangla; that does not mean we can [let them] settle down en masse in Bengal and make them our vote bank,” said BJP state president and Rajya Sabha member Samik Bhattacharya.

He dismissed the possibility of the controversy working in favour of the TMC in the elections, and said, “I challenge Mamata Banerjee to ensure the victory of a single candidate even in a municipal election from a Bengali-dominated locality.”