In this part of the world, being a minority is rarely a completely comfortable experience. Across the Indian subcontinent, irrespective of the border one happens to live on, minorities live with a degree of unease that the majority can afford to ignore.
Sometimes it is vague apprehension, sometimes outright fear, and increasingly, a question of identity, dignity, and survival.
This is true of religious minorities, but also of linguistic, ethnic, and cultural ones. Intolerance towards minorities may well be the most corrosive malaise afflicting our societies today.
Durga Puja, the biggest festival of Bengali Hindus, is almost upon us in both Bengals. It should be a season of celebration, music, food, adda and, above all, an exuberant assertion of Bengali culture.
Instead, the festival arrives this year with an unmistakable whiff of anxiety.
In West Bengal, the new government has reportedly decreed that Durga Puja should not even be called "Sharadotsav." Religious figures from the Hindi heartland are telling Bengalis what they should eat during their own festival, including suggestions that fish and meat ought to be kept away from the Puja table.
Hardline Hindutva organizations, meanwhile, are instructing Bengalis on how their Puja should be conducted, urging them to abandon the supposedly vulgar excesses of “theme pujas” and return to the purity of traditional ritual.
Bengalis, it appears, need lessons in how to be Bengali. One wonders what greater triumph of tolerance could possibly be demanded.
Look across the border and the picture is no less unsettling. I have no idea how many reports of vandalized Durga idols will emerge from different parts of Bangladesh this year. Nor do I know whether cricketers Litton Das or Soumya Sarkar will feel sufficiently secure to wish their fans on Durga Puja.
Will actor Yash Rohan once again proclaim his Hindu identity on social media, knowing what the trolls may throw at him? Will Chanchal Chowdhury again post a photograph of his mother wearing sindoor? I genuinely do not know.
And perhaps that is precisely what is so disturbing. A citizen should not have to calculate the risks before wishing others on a religious festival.
A film star should not have to wonder whether displaying his faith will make him a target. A cricketer should not have to decide whether a simple greeting could trigger a social-media storm. Yet here we are.
On this side of the border, there are other reminders of how selectively we apply the language of inconvenience. For generations, Kolkata's Red Road has hosted Eid prayers. This year, the practice was stopped on the grounds of civic inconvenience. Muslims, after some initial grumbling, accepted the decision.
Then came the curious part: The same road was closed for days for a Prime Minister's program. Apparently, some public inconveniences are more equal than others.
Across the border, the mother of a Hindu monk detained in a Bangladeshi jail lay on her deathbed. Yet the son was reportedly denied even the few hours of parole needed to see her one last time.
Indeed, over the past two years, Durga Puja itself has become an unlikely item on the India-Bangladesh diplomatic agenda. Delhi has repeatedly reminded Dhaka that the safety of minorities and peaceful celebration of Puja are the responsibility of the government in power.
Dhaka has responded with equal firmness: Minority protection is an internal matter, and India should first look at the treatment of Muslims in its own backyard.
Both governments have a point. Both governments also have a blind spot. The uncomfortable truth is that minorities on both sides of the border are vulnerable. And the larger social problem is not merely the occasional failure of the state. It is the steady erosion of tolerance within society itself.
History offers enough warnings. A nation state that cannot make its minorities feel secure eventually creates a problem much larger than minority rights. It weakens social cohesion, feeds grievance, damages internal security and, sooner or later, creates consequences beyond its own borders.
But history books are one thing. Electoral politics is another. In the brutal arithmetic of democracy, numbers matter.
A community that does not constitute a sufficiently large ‘voting block’ is unlikely to receive the same political attention as one that can determine electoral outcomes.
Governments may speak the language of constitutional equality, but political parties speak, more often than not, the language of numbers.
This is where the contradiction becomes particularly stark. Both India and Bangladesh have constitutional guarantees protecting fundamental rights. The freedom to practise one's religion, to live with dignity and security, and to preserve one's identity are not favours bestowed by a benevolent majority. They are rights.
The real question is what happens when constitutional rights encounter social prejudice and political expediency.
Bangladesh offers a particularly instructive example because its minority question is far more complicated than the familiar Hindu-Muslim binary.
After several visits to the country, I have come to realize that even within the category of “minority,” there are layers of vulnerability.
Bangladesh's Hindus, the country's largest religious minority, understandably occupy much of the public discussion. Their concerns are real, and the difficulties faced by sections of the Hindu community are well documented. But stop at Hindu identity and we miss the larger picture.
Consider the Urdu-speaking Bihari Muslims of Geneva Camp. They are Muslims in a predominantly Muslim country. Yet decades after the birth of Bangladesh, many remain socially and economically marginalized, struggling to be fully absorbed into the national mainstream. I have seen some of that unease myself.
Or take the Telugu-speaking Hindu scavengers of Dhaka's Methorpatti. Their story is different again. They told me that their families had traditionally performed this work for generations, going back to the British period. Now, they said, members of the Muslim majority were increasingly entering the same occupation.
And then there are the indigenous communities of the Chittagong Hill Tracts and the Garo Hills, minorities in an ethnic and cultural sense, whose conflicts with people from the plains over land, resources, and their right to preserve their way of life have continued for decades.
Different communities. Different histories. Different grievances. But beneath them runs the same uncomfortable thread: The majority's difficulty in accommodating difference.
The mirror image exists on this side of the border too. What I sometimes call “Greater Bengal,” stretching across West Bengal, Tripura, and Assam, has its own catalogue of minority anxieties.
In West Bengal, a government with an unmistakable religious identity has recently come to power. Sections of the majority community, emboldened by the new political climate, appear increasingly comfortable displaying their religious muscle.
The result is predictable: Minorities retreat. They become more guarded about their identity, withdraw into familiar neighbourhoods and communities, and the psychological walls of the ghetto grow higher.
Assam has spent the past decade living with the anxieties surrounding the NRC, citizenship, and delimitation. For ethnic and linguistic minorities, questions of belonging and political representation are not abstract constitutional debates. They touch everyday life.
Tripura presents another version of the same story. Indigenous tribal communities increasingly fear that the state is intruding into their traditional way of life and that the Bengali Hindu majority is gradually overwhelming their language, culture, and social space. Again, the fault line is different. Again, the underlying problem is remarkably similar. We have forgotten how to live with differences.
There is a larger South Asian lesson here. Good news travels slowly across borders. Bad news travels at extraordinary speed. A progressive reform in one country may take years to influence the other. But a communal riot, an attack on a temple or mosque, a provocative speech or a piece of hateful social-media propaganda can cross the border almost instantly. Hatred needs no visa.
That is why the treatment of minorities cannot be dismissed as an internal matter by either India or Bangladesh. The two countries may disagree on almost everything else, but they are tied together by geography, history, language, religion, culture, and memory. What happens to minorities in one country inevitably resonates among communities across the border.
So, as Durga Puja approaches, perhaps the real test is not how grandly we celebrate our own faith, but how comfortable we are allowing somebody else to celebrate theirs.
India and Bangladesh do not need more sermons on secularism. They need the less glamorous business of enforcing the rights already promised by their constitutions.
Governments must protect minorities even when doing so is electorally inconvenient. Political leaders must resist majoritarian pressure rather than ride it. And societies must learn, once again, that difference is not an existential threat.
A minority does not ask for special treatment. It asks not to be treated as a problem. That should not be too much to ask in either Bengal. Because if the state fails to protect its minorities, the consequences will not remain neatly confined within national borders.
Fear will travel. Grievance will travel. Retaliatory politics will travel. And eventually, so will the bill.
Dr Anindita Ghoshal is Professor of History at Presidency University, Kolkata. Views expressed are the writer’s own.