Bangladesh’s February 12 election delivered a result that was decisive in its headline numbers but deeply unsettling in its detail. The Bangladesh Nationalist Party (BNP), led by Tarique Rahman, swept to power in a landslide, winning 209 seats. Jamaat-e-Islami, the Islamist party that was previously banned, secured 68 seats, its best performance in history. The Awami League was barred from contesting entirely. These three facts are now being read very differently by political forces in two Indian states, Assam and West Bengal, as they head into elections in April 2026. Bangladesh’s electoral result isn’t just being reported in India; it’s being actively manufactured into electoral ammunition, and that process tells us something important about how entangled foreign electoral outcomes and domestic communal politics have become in the borderland states.

For India, the BNP’s return to power is not simply another foreign election result but a moment that reopens older strategic anxieties. In the immediate aftermath, Indian right-wing media framed the exclusion of the Awami League as evidence of an Islamist turn in Bangladesh. Previously, Indian right-wing outlets had seized on the Awami League’s exclusion as evidence of an Islamist turn in Bangladesh. Yet this narrative has been complicated by diplomatic signals suggesting a cautious thaw in bilateral relations. In December, newly elected Prime Minister Tarique Rahman received Indian Foreign Minister S. Jaishankar, who arrived bearing a personal letter from Prime Minister Narendra Modi offering condolences for the passing of Tarique’s mother, Begum Khaleda Zia.

Nonetheless, the memory that looms largest in Indian strategic thinking about BNP’s previous rule is the April 2004 Chittagong arms haul: ten truckloads of weapons intercepted at a government-controlled jetty, destined for the United Liberation Front of Asom (ULFA) (an armed separatist organisation in Assam)  at a time when ULFA’s leadership operated freely from Bangladeshi soil. Under the Awami League governments from 2009 onwards, that infrastructure was systematically dismantled, with ULFA leaders being arrested and extradited. With the BNP now in power, and Tarique Rahman having signalled that previous bilateral agreements will be reviewed, India’s security establishment is watching closely.

At the same time, Jamaat-e-Islami’s electoral gains are being read with particular intensity in West Bengal. Jamaat-e-Islami is a longstanding Islamist political party advocating for governance shaped by conservative religious mobilisation, and has re-emerged as a significant electoral force in the current post-Awami League political landscape. A significant proportion of Jamaat’s parliamentary seats were won in constituencies located along or near the Indian border, creating what appears to be a near-contiguous arc of Islamist political representation adjacent to West Bengal. Jamaat’s 68 seats tell a story that is being read very carefully in West Bengal. Maps of Bangladesh’s election results, with Jamaat’s border constituencies highlighted, have circulated widely on social media and right-wing TV channels, accompanied by claims that the border is at risk.

For the Trinamool Congress (TMC), which has governed West Bengal since 2011 on a substantial Muslim voter support base, the Jamaat geography is a double vulnerability: it feeds right-wing opposition Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) narratives about the TMC’s alleged ‘minority appeasement‘ while simultaneously threatening to create anxiety among Hindu voters in border-adjacent districts where the TMC has historically been strongest. The result is a tightening of the electoral space in which cross-border developments are translated into domestic political pressure.

In Assam, Bangladesh’s election results enter a political environment already structured around questions of citizenship and belonging. The National Register of Citizens (NRC) process of 2019 left nearly two million people unable to prove their documentation and effectively stateless, entrenching citizenship as the state’s defining fault line. In this context, anti-India rhetoric after the fall of the India-aligned Awami League now gives that fault line fresh voltage: they supply the BJP with a live, cross-border referent for the claim that ‘Muslim infiltration‘ is not simply a historical grievance but an ongoing emergency.

Assam’s Chief Minister Himanta Biswa Sarma of the BJP, campaigning on a ‘foreigner-free Assam’ platform, has worked to securitise Bangladesh as an existential territorial threat. The most extreme example was perhaps on February 7, when the Assam BJP’s official X account posted an AI-generated video showing Sarma symbolically firing at images of Muslim men, accompanied by captions ‘There is no forgiveness to Bangladeshis’. The video was deleted after widespread outrage and condemnation from opposition leaders, rights groups, and intellectuals who approached the state’s High Court. This incident illustrates the extent to which political messaging has blurred the line between rhetorical escalation and incitement.

Meanwhile, West Bengal’s electoral dynamics carry their own structural weight, quite independent of developments in Bangladesh. The Trinamool Congress (TMC) is seeking a historic fourth consecutive term, having governed the state uninterrupted since 2011. That adds up to fifteen years of rule by Mamata Banerjee’s party — a long incumbency that has inevitably bred significant anti-incumbency sentiment on the ground. A mid-2025 survey by Vote Vibe captured this mood sharply: 53.2% of West Bengal respondents expressed anti-incumbency feelings toward the TMC government. The discontent cut across age groups and genders, reflecting widespread frustration over issues such as governance, jobs, urban infrastructure and law-and-order concerns that have accumulated over three full terms.

The BJP’s strategy for the upcoming election is to ensure that every piece of negative news from across the border reinforces the anti-incumbency case: that fifteen years of TMC governance have left Bengal’s borders ungoverned, its voter rolls allegedly contaminated, and its security compromised. The Special Intensive Revision (SIR) controversy— in which the Election Commission’s roll revision exercise has been accused of disproportionately targeting Muslim and migrant-origin voters in TMC strongholds- sits at the intersection of Bangladesh anxiety and anti-incumbency politics. In this way, anxieties about Bangladesh are not isolated but are woven into existing political grievances, amplifying their electoral impact.

What emerges from this cross-border dynamic is not simply a story about Bangladesh’s election but about how its outcomes are refracted through the logics of Indian electoral competition. The February election has been selectively amplified, reinterpreted, and instrumentalised within Assam and West Bengal, transforming external political developments into internal sources of communal anxiety and security discourse. This reveals a broader pattern in India’s eastern borderlands, where the distinction between genuine security concerns and politically manufactured threats becomes increasingly difficult to sustain. In this context, Bangladesh’s election functions less as an external event and more as a catalyst for domestic political mobilisation, highlighting the deep entanglement between regional geopolitics and subnational electoral strategies.

Further Reading on E-International Relations