The BJP’s Behrampore MLA Gouri Sankar Ghosh on Friday became the latest addition to the growing list of saffron lawmakers demanding a division, or even a trifurcation, of Bengal.

Ghosh on Friday came out in support of the demand made by his party's Jharkhand MP, Nishikant Dubey, in Parliament on Thursday. Dubey called for the creation of a Union Territory comprising Malda and Murshidabad districts of Bengal, along with the districts of Kishanganj, Araria, Katihar and Purnia of Bihar, because they have a Muslim majority.

“I wrote a letter to the Union home ministry two years ago demanding a Union Territory including Bengal’s Malda and Murshidabad. My demand is to bring areas where lawlessness prevails under that Union Territory to establish the rule of law,” claimed Ghosh, furnishing a letter of the demand from 2022.

The deliberate inflammatory statements have raised questions even within sections of the saffron camp. Some wonder if the BJP is essentially harming itself by engaging with the highly emotive issue of redrawing Bengal’s borders, potentially giving Mamata Banerjee an advantage long before the 2026 elections.

“The demand to divide Bengal is not new, especially from north Bengal. Our Rajya Sabha member Nagendra Ray (on Thursday) reiterated his old demand. However, the party never endorsed such proposals, as any call for another Partition of Bengal is unlikely to find many takers even among the most BJP-supporting, hardline Hindutva-backing, polarised Hindu Bengalis,” said a BJP leader in Calcutta.

On Wednesday, the BJP’s state unit chief and junior Union minister Sukanta Majumdar — usually a moderate voice in the far-Right party — claimed that he met Prime Minister Narendra Modi and submitted a proposal to include the eight north Bengal districts from Cooch Behar to South Dinajpur in the North Eastern Council (meant for the eight northeastern states) so that the region receives more central funds for development.

Although a section of the BJP leaders claimed that Majumdar’s proposal was not related to any division of Bengal and was aimed at expediting development in the region, the saffron camp has been openly displaying favouritism towards north Bengal as it has remained on a solid footing there in recent elections.

However, Ray made matters worse on Thursday, reiterating the longstanding demand of the Rajbanshi community for the Greater Cooch Behar state. “Home minister Amit Shah assured me that he would look into the demand for a separate state. The Prime Minister’s Office also instructed the home ministry to set up Greater Cooch Behar,” Ray had told journalists on the premises of Parliament.

Beleaguered by a volley of belligerent attacks from various quarters — including all three major non-BJP parties in Bengal — the BJP on Friday issued a clarificatory statement that its party line was to keep the state’s territory intact.

“I can say that the party’s line is against any bifurcation of Bengal, and the BJP wants to keep the territory of the state intact. If anyone claims differently, beyond the party line, it is not a subject for discussion,” said the party’s chief spokesperson for Bengal Samik Bhattacharya, a Rajya Sabha member. He added that the demand for statehood occasionally emerged from north Bengal because the state government had always deprived the region.

Asked whether he supports Dubey’s Muslim-majority Union Territory proposal, Bhattacharya said while he endorses the logic of “changing demography” because of “infiltration”, he does not support the demand for separating the two districts from the state.

This unfounded hypothesis of the changing demography on account of infiltration — primarily to bolster the saffron camp’s hackneyed yet fearsome weapon of polarisation by vilification and otherisation of Muslims, despite its monumental failure in Bengal in 2021 and 2024 — was brought to the fore on July 17, separately, by Bengal BJP’s Suvendu Adhikari and Assam’s BJP chief minister Himanta Biswa Sharma.

A BJP insider said the most embarrassing thing for the Bengal leadership was the neither-spit-nor-swallow situation with these senior lawmakers. “It is better for us if the central leadership issues a whip against not commenting in public about such things about Bengal. We are serving Bengal on a platter to Trinamool ahead of 2026 by doing these things,” said one of them.