The Bharatiya Janata Party's victory has undoubtedly changed the atmosphere of West Bengal, and it is assuredly for the worse. A state that has long been accustomed to religious coexistence is rapidly being denigrated into subservience to the Hindutva agenda. People who, until yesterday, were living harmoniously are being taught to look at their neighbours through the prism of religion.

History, no doubt, witnesses that Bengal has never been perfect. It has seen communal riots, political violence and periods of intense polarisation. Yet the cultural imagination has traditionally been larger than its religious identities. The Bengal of Ramakrishna, Vivekananda, Tagore, Nazrul and Vidyasagar never asked a person's religious identity. It asked what kind of human being they were.

That secular and magnanimous inheritance is now under siege.

The recent intimidation of Christian priests and missionaries in places such as Sandeshkhali, Nazat and Bamanpukur is incredibly disturbing because Christians constitute such a small minority in Bengal as to be ignored as a rounding error. What threat can a community of such numbers realistically pose to the majority? Yet the bogey of conversion is repeatedly produced as though it were self-evident. Priests and missionaries are being questioned, threatened and asked to leave places where Christian communities have existed and served for generations.

The accusation itself requires serious examination. If a small Christian population is supposedly engaged in a large-scale campaign to convert Hindus, there must be credible evidence. Religious belief cannot be treated as criminal merely because one community dislikes another community's religious activity.

It is an established fact that Bengal owes an enormous part of its modern education, healthcare, printing and social reform to Christian institutions. Missionaries established schools, colleges, hospitals and other infrastructure.

Serampore became an important centre of printing and education. Christian educational institutions continue to serve thousands of Bengal's children and young people, irrespective of their religious identity. The Missionaries of Charity became internationally known for caring for the poorest and most abandoned people in Kolkata.

Christianity has been part of Bengal's cultural history for centuries. To describe Christians today as some kind of foreign intrusion is historically ignorant.

The same poison can be seen in the treatment of Muslims. The language of "infiltrators," demands to prove belonging and attempts to turn citizenship into a religious question create a permanent atmosphere of insecurity. A Bengali Christian or Muslim should not have to demonstrate their patriotism more loudly than a Bengali Hindu. Citizenship is not a favour distributed by the majority.

The BJP may have won Bengal electorally, but an election victory does not confer ownership of Bengal's history, culture or conscience. The State belongs equally to the Hindu, Muslim, Christian, Buddhist, tribal and atheist. Its temples, mosques and churches are not competing claims upon the land; they are part of the civilisation that Bengal has created.