Political campaigns are, at their core, theatre. In a month or so of campaigning, rival party leaders compete by theatrically performing their claims to representation. Through body language, symbols, and rhetoric, whoever can most authentically embody the identity and the interests of the collective ‘lok’ (demos) typically earns the mandate.
On this test, the Trinamool Congress has palpably outperformed the Bharatiya Janata Party in the battle for Bengal. Right from the outset, Mamata Banerjee, unmatched in her feel for political theatre, turned fish into the campaign symbol that crystallised the contradiction between the TMC’s Bengali sub-nationalism and the BJP’s Hindu nationalism. With the rallying cry of ‘Maachhe Bhaat e Bangali’ (fish and rice make a Bengali), Banerjee made full use of the attacks on meat shops and on Bengali speakers by Hindutva activists in North India to highlight Hindu nationalist hostility towards Bengali culture.
The BJP campaign took the bait and, until the last day of the campaign to the first phase of the elections, made a series of strained efforts to counter the charge, culminating in the smarmy spectacle of the BJP MP, Anurag Thakur, eating fish curry under the glare of television cameras. It reminded one of the equally awkward temple visits of Rahul Gandhi in the run-up to the 2017 Gujarat election. It is a paradox of political theatre that the defensive act of trying to prove the authenticity of one’s cultural roots tends to further call it into question. To put it another way, the more you flop around, the more you look like a fish out of water.
The BJP’s strategy in this election has been, in many respects, quite baffling. In an article last year for The Telegraph on the Bengal election, I had argued that the BJP’s route to power in Bengal lay in exposing the gap that has opened up, after 15 years in office, between the TMC’s claim to represent the ‘lok’ and the actual functioning of its ‘tantra’ (machinery of power). By the latter, I meant the everyday corruption of the TMC’s “franchise model”, as described by Dwaipayan Bhattacharyya, where local TMC units are run by political entrepreneurs who rely on Banerjee’s personal brand to legitimise their patronage-based business activities. This organisational machine, which converts political capital into financial capital and vice-versa, certainly generates enough exclusions and disaffection to fuel an anti-incumbency wave.
Instead, the BJP has turned the contest into a battle of official machinery (tantra), allowing the TMC to deepen its hold on the claim to popular sovereignty rooted in the Bengali lok. The senior journalist, Jayanta Ghosal, is right in portraying Amit Shah, not Narendra Modi, as the leader who has defined the party’s campaign through underhanded tactics and partisan use of State power. The unprecedented use of Central armed forces in a state election (outside of Kashmir and the Northeast) has invited Banerjee to reclaim her favourite persona of an insurgent leader, which she has performed with characteristic passion and ferocity. In Naxalbari, for example, Banerjee asked local women to keep vigil at polling booths and use household items to deal with “necessary situations”.
The BJP’s decision to anchor the election in tantra rather than lok can also be seen in the most shambolic and discriminatory roll out of the Special Intensive Revision. Even if one accepts the contention that most of the 9.1 million deleted voters were, indeed, dead or duplicates, the exclusion of nearly all of the 2.7 million people who challenged their removals is a patently partisan attempt to deny millions of citizens their constitutional right to vote.
Worse, many believe, with some justification, that they have been denied the right to vote on religious grounds. There have certainly been documented cases of mass deletions in Muslim-dominated constituencies. Furthermore, constituency-wise estimates by political parties indicate that around 65% of the excluded 2.7 million were Muslims.
As I argued in an earlier article for The Telegraph, the political logic of the SIR appeared to be the creation of a Jim Crow-style system of electoral exclusion targeting large numbers of marginalised Muslims. Suvendu Adhikari, the BJP’s leader of the Opposition in the state, last year urged the Election Commission of India to remove “nearly one crore Rohingya immigrants, Bangladeshi Muslim voters” (read: Bengali Muslim voters).
The “purification” of the electoral roll, the telling metaphor used by Amit Shah, may have fallen short of Adhikari’s fevered dreams, but it still offers strong evidence that the Indian State is moving toward a form of Herrenvolk democracy — a ‘democratic’ system, like that of the Jim Crow-era American South, centred on a dominant ethnic majority with limited political rights for minorities.
Let us now turn to the question of why the BJP has not focused its campaign on offering an alternative model of popular sovereignty. We can only speculate here but it appears that the answer partly lies in the deflated personal image of Narendra Modi. Unlike the Modi of 2019 Lok Sabha election or even the Modi of the 2021 Bengal assembly elections, the Modi of 2026 seems to have lost the aura of ‘transformative change’. After 12 years in power, the jaded persona of Modi lacks the magnetism needed to activate the latent issues of unemployment and industrial stagnation in a state that has seen steady out-migration for jobs, particularly from the poorer districts.
Beyond Modi, the BJP as a party has lost ownership of two key narratives that pushed its geographic expansion over the past decade. The first is the narrative of ‘clean governance’, which has been drained of all credibility as the BJP kept an ‘open-door’ policy toward Opposition leaders it once accused of corruption and investigated through Central agencies. This is apparent in West Bengal where it is fronted by leaders like Adhikari, the former TMC leader who bolted to the stables of the BJP after being implicated in the Saradha chit fund and the Narada bribery scandals.
The second is the narrative of efficiency or developmental gains of a ‘double engine sarkar’, a claim that now carries a tinge of parody, given the condition of much of North
India after a decade or so of double-engine rule.
If the TMC appears to have the edge over the BJP in another bipolar contest, it is not because the Bengal electorate is wholly satisfied with the long reign of Banerjee. To adapt the conceptual framework of the German historian, Reinhart Koselleck, voters interpret their present condition not only through the “space of experience” (what they have seen and experienced before) but also through the “horizon of expectation” (what they expect or anticipate from the future). The present remains acceptable so long as expectations of the future are modest, given the range of perceived alternatives.
The broad trend of chief ministers across party lines consolidating support through paltry cash transfers (misleadingly termed welfare policies) has certainly narrowed the horizon of expectations among Indian voters and, in many ways, diminished the transformative promise of Indian democracy.
Nevertheless, a TMC victory would still amount to a partial redemption of the country’s democratic setup given the unprecedented assault mounted by the BJP regime on the state government as well as on the constitutional right to vote. It would also make Banerjee a four-time chief minister, a two-time vanquisher of Modi and Shah in direct electoral contests, and, in consequence, a serious contender for the post of prime minister in 2029.
Asim Ali is a political researcher and columnist