Malkangiri violence | Keeping Bengali migrants at bay

The line slicing bengal and Odisha into two is a modern cartographer’s invention. In its original form, Dandabhukti was one lifeworld—a web spun by rivers, merchants, pilgrims, deities, poets, artists and motifs. The Bay of Bengal coastline did not divide. It unified. If history’s contrasts are to be seen sharpened to an extreme, late 2025 is a good time. A drive against undocumented immigration in Odisha, after the flavour of the season, has slipped dangerously into a high tide of suspicion, hate and violence. The targets: Bengali-speaking migrants.

The stories surfacing across Odisha are unsettling in their similarity—being Muslim and Bengali simultaneously might as well be a prima facie crime. In Nayagarh, just before December, four small-time traders from Murshidabad were accosted by police and told to pack up within 72 hours. Their Aadhaar cards and voter IDs were waved away, their Bengali accents turned into instant proof of “foreignness”. The men fled, leaving behind goods worth lakhs—winter garments and other utilities. In August, eight Murshidabad labourers endured a terrifying midnight assault by a mob in Bhubaneswar: they hurled bottles, sticks and accusations of being “Bangladeshi cattle-thieves”. Officialdom had built up the mood. In July, hundreds of this cohort were detained on suspicion, then released.

SWEEPING ANGER

But as often seen across India, the hostility has a deeper core. Those who speak Bengali already fall within its searchlight—religion no bar. The latest evidence has burst forth with explosive violence. Venue: MV-26, a village in Odisha’s Malkangiri. It’s one of those settlements set up for Hindu refugees from East Pakistan back in the day. Now it was turning into a new frontier, a new partition.

First, the headless body of a Koya tribal woman, Lake Podiami, was discovered in a river. A Bengali from MV-26, Subharanjan Mondal, was arrested. That sufficed as a cue. A 5,000-strong mob stormed the settlement where around a hundred Bengali families live, torching houses, belongings and vehicles. Police and paramilitary forces now stand guard among ashes.

Just across the border in West Bengal, coastal Digha decided to get in on the game with a spot of mirrored anger. In late November, local shopkeepers suddenly started demanding that the 150-odd Odia traders plying their wares in the tourist town be likewise ousted from their midst. The district administration concurred with the sentiment, and its banishment orders were dressed up as a civic eviction drive against illegal encroachments. Luckily, the Odias approached some local social organisations in their desperation, and they stepped in. Finally, the expulsion orders were rescinded.

Upshot: Bengal isn’t immune to xenophobia, but its society had some built-in safeguards that acted more in line with the constitutional spirit. The hatred, however, had already been relayed into a hall of mirrors by that stage. Back in Odisha, Chandaneswar in Balasore was the home of Digha’s victims—in fact, many here earn their livelihood by running small businesses in Digha. So locals demanded that Bengali traders shut their shops and leave. This was at least a specific act of retaliation, not generalised hate. Tender mercies that don’t help mitigate the air.

NOT JUST ISLAMOPHOBIA

Historians wistfully recall gentler times: Nivedita Mohanty, for one, says the communities once sparred only over light-hearted matters like the origin of the rosogolla. Kashshaf Ghani, assistant professor, Nalanda University, says these lands were braided together on all fronts: trade with Southeast Asia, wars against the Marathas, Bengali overlords ruling stretches of Odisha, Odia scribes penning Bengali tales in their script.

Arindam Chakraborty of Mahishadal Raj College recalls that Odia literary great Fakir Mohan Senapati’s school in Remuna, Balasore, was funded not by Odia nobility but by a Bengali landlord. And that the Jagannath rath yatra sees as much fervour in Bengal as in Puri. The scholarly consensus is gentle: they feel what’s unfolding now is a case of the rising tide of Islamophobia breaching its embankments.

Judging from the events, though, it’s a more layered overlap. Those who suffer the most, inevitably, are those poor enough to live by seasonal migration and quiet labour.