The election season invariably comes early in West Bengal. This should come as no surprise. The tales of political travellers suggest that in contemporary India at least, there is a positive correlation between tardy economic growth and the intensity of political engagement. What adds to the passion of partisanship is the unending tendency of political players — notably the side that is in control of the administration — to take rivalry at the grassroots to a bloody conclusion. The trend started in the aftermath of the Left parties getting the better of the Congress in 1967, but even the entry of India into the borderlands of a mid-income economy has not quite satisfied West Bengal’s voracious appetite for its own variant of the class struggle. There is an undeniable exceptionalism that defines the politics of the state.
Since the Left Front won power in 1977, there have been numerous attempts to integrate West Bengal’s politics into the national mainstream. The two most sustained challenges to the dominance of the regional forces were in 1987 and 2021, by the Congress and the Bharatiya Janata Party, respectively. In hindsight, both faltered at the altar of Bengali pride. Both Rajiv Gandhi, who led the challenge to Jyoti Basu by suggesting he retire from public life, and Narendra Modi, whose taunting references to ‘Didi’ Mamata Banerjee are said to have provoked a backlash, were victims of the same Bengali inclination to put identity above economic self-interest.
Early indications suggest that the All India Trinamool Congress is intent on replicating the same approach in the assembly elections scheduled for April-May 2026. For long, the state BJP faced the polls with a huge image handicap. Till recently, it was posited as a party of Hindi speakers who, to cap it all, were vegetarians. In 2021, the BJP erred grievously in failing to keep its Hindi-speaking observers from the party headquarters behind a veil of anonymity. It is unlikely this error will be repeated in the forthcoming election since both its leader of Opposition and state president are about as Bengali as you can get. For the chief minister, this is undoubtedly a problem, but she has chosen to keep the issue alive by fulminating against the anti-Bengali inclinations of BJP-run state governments in neighbouring states.
For Mamata Banerjee, there is a sleight of hand involved here. Since the 1990s, the BJP has made the illegal influx of Bangladeshi Muslims into eastern India a big political issue. Initially, this fear of demographic change had a nominal impact among the electorate, but two factors have triggered an attitudinal shift.
First, the fear of a Bangladeshi Muslim influx was aggravated by the additional wariness of organised Rohingya infiltration into the state. Throughout Greater Calcutta and the erstwhile Presidency division, there are claims of mushrooming Rohingya settlements, which are centres of crime and no-go zones for the authorities. The fear has also gripped other parts of India, including Jammu, Delhi, Rajasthan and even Gujarat.
Secondly, the regime change in August 2024 led to the abrupt collapse of faith in a ‘secular’ Bangladesh. The interim government led by the chief adviser, Muhammad Yunus, is perceived in India as both anti-Hindu and pro-Islamist. The fear that has gripped the Hindu minority in Bangladesh — notably over the safety of women — has not left Hindus in West Bengal unaffected. It has further fuelled a belief that Hindus in West Bengal must fear for their future. According to CSDS-Lokniti surveys, the Lok Sabha elections of 2019 and 2024 and the assembly election of 2021 saw more than half the Hindu voters of the state repose their faith in the BJP. The overall AITC victory was on account of the support of more than 90% of Muslim voters and a substantial minority of Hindus, particularly among women and urban voters.
Since the 2021 election, the state BJP leadership, particularly Suvendu Adhikari, has been campaigning aggressively on the plank of Hindu unity. It is being suggested that a mere shift of some 3% to 4% of Hindu votes will be sufficient to deprive Mamata Banerjee of her majority in the assembly. In recent months, he has supplemented the appeal for Hindu consolidation with a scheme for tactical voting against the AITC in constituencies where there is a plurality of Muslim voters.
The BJP’s appeal for Hindus to vote en bloc hasn’t yet been fully tested. However, the chief minister is mindful that the challenge is real. Her overreaction to stray incidents of genuine voters being detained as Bangladeshis in Odisha and Assam is calculated. First, the attempt is to show that there is a campaign, orchestrated by the BJP, to portray all Bangla speakers as Bangladeshis worthy of expulsion from India. The idea is to simultaneously frighten and anger Hindu Bengalis whose language pride is a badge of identity. Secondly, the chief minister is acting on the assumption that projecting the cleansing of electoral rolls as a move against Bangla speakers will lead to the Centre going slow on the verification process. Any respite to real or suspected Bangladeshis will add to her pro-Muslim credentials, while stigmatising the BJP for being indifferent to West Bengal’s linguistic identity.
If, after completing the verification of rolls in Bihar, the Election Commission shifts its gaze to West Bengal where the use of dodgy Aadhaar cards is rampant, we are likely to see the AITC raise the political temperature. The BJP has a big interest in ensuring that the voter rolls are made ‘Rohingya-free’. However, it also has to factor in the harassment and the persecution of a large number of Hindus from Bangladesh who live in the state without either proper documentation or the community protection available to Bangladeshi Muslims. There are ground reports that the Union home ministry’s bid to give citizenship to those who came into India prior to the end of 2014 has been completely sabotaged by low-level functionaries entrusted with the verification process. The large numbers of rejections of applications under the Citizenship (Amendment) Act are acting as a deterrent to those it was aimed at benefiting.
If this trend persists, the BJP will be caught in a pincer movement: it will be confronted with a consolidation of minority votes while simultaneously facing a wave of disappointment among those who felt that India was a permanent refuge for Hindus all over the world. There are many other factors, such as organisational rigour and administrative neutrality, that determine electoral outcomes. However, the 2026 assembly election will also test the extent to which the sectarian schism will determine the political future of West Bengal. A lot can happen in the coming eight months.