The debate was expected to be between stability and stagnation. It turned out to be one between the spectre of demographic change and Bengal’s egalitarian ethos.
Before the Sister Nivedita University presents Calcutta Club The Telegraph National Debate 2026 began, journalist-author-columnist and moderator Vir Sanghvi asked for a show of hands.
An overwhelming majority among the audience voted in favour of the motion — “Status quo has been the unmaking of West Bengal”.
The motion was carried at the end of the debate but the scales had tilted back partially, a show of hands suggested, bearing testimony to the valiant effort of the opposition.
As Sanghvi had suspected it would, the debate soon took on the shape of a political battle. This owed, to a large extent, to the side supporting the motion.
All four of its members were part of the Rightwing ecosystem — three BJP leaders and a senior functionary of its ideological fountainhead, the RSS.
Swapan Dasgupta, BJP leader, columnist, television commentator and former Rajya Sabha member, opened and later summed up the arguments for the proposition.
He started off by extolling the much-hyped AI Impact Summit in Delhi. Dasgupta contrasted the summit with what he said Bengal was preoccupied with — the right prefix and suffix for its icons like Ramakrishna Paramahamsa and Bankim Chandra Chattopadhyay.
“How much we have reduced our mental horizon…. It has gone down exponentially…. From what we were to what we are,” he said.
While summing up, he accused the opposition of ignoring the “real and present problems” caused by the status quo, such as the exodus of young people for want of jobs in Bengal and the RG Kar rape and murder.
But he sidestepped the Galgotias fiasco reported from the AI summit, which many would say caused the country a loss of face before the world.
Eminent speakers engaged in a charged exchange at the Calcutta Club–The Telegraph National Debate 2026, themed “Status quo implies Stability? or Stagnation?”, debating the motion ‘Status Quo Has Been the Unmaking of West Bengal’ at Calcutta Club Lawns on Friday, February 21, 2026.
Harvard history professor Sugata Bose, a great-nephew of Netaji Subhas Chandra Bose, kicked off proceedings for the opposition. He began by paying tribute — in Bengali — to the martyrs of the February 21 Language Movement Day (Bhasha Andolan Dibas) before switching to English.
He reminded the audience of the status quo that Bengal needed to follow — “an unswerving commitment to equality and unity”.
“The proponents want you to acquiesce in a change for the worse. We cannot allow Bengal to be turned into an Uttar Pradesh with its bulldozer injustice. Or an Assam whose chief minister spouts venom every day. Bengal must remain true to its own heritage,” he said.
Sambit Patra, a familar BJP face on television, and Samik Bhattacharya, the party’s Bengal unit boss, made fervent and often theatrical appeals, mostly for the protection of Bengal from what they felt was a Muslim invasion of sorts.
Many in the audience and moderator Sanghvi himself construed their comments as an exercise in electioneering in the run-up to the battle for Bengal.
Patra came armed with a sheaf of papers. He kept reading out from them, listing the numerous victims of post-poll violence in Bengal and reeling off numbers he claimed suggested demographic changes on both sides of the Bengal-Bangladesh border.
All this is happening because “they wanted to change the demography of Bengal”, he said, predicting “doom” if and when that happened.
“In Bengal, there is no rule of law but the law of the ruler,” Patra said, drawing applause, before spending a solid two minutes reciting portions of Birendra Krishna Bhadra’s Mahishasura Mardini.
Bhattacharya pitted the “bullet train” — among the favourite emblems of the Narendra Modi regime — against “Mamata”. One meant progress and the other meant stagnation, he said.
He accused the “seculars and liberals” of selective outrage — crying their heart out for far-off countries but remaining mum on the atrocities on Hindus in Bangladesh. “We are headed towards doom with dogged determination,” he said.
For the Opposition, economist Abhirup Sarkar did what he does best — make his point with numbers to counter the perceived notion of Bengal’s alleged stagnation.
At the time of Independence, Bengal was a pioneer in industry but lagged way behind in agriculture, he said. Now, it lags behind in industry but has made significant progress in agriculture, Sarkar said.
The choice that successive governments in Bengal faced was a “trade-off” between “progress and distribution”, he said, adding that the governments had chosen the latter.
Jaideep Gupta, senior advocate in the Supreme Court, argued that Bengal had shaken off the status quo several times in the past, from leading the fight for Independence to fashioning the Pariborton of 2011.
“You have to decide who to elect next time. But you are now being asked to go for another pariborton.... A pariborton which will take Bengal back 1,000 years to a civilisation somewhat different to what Bengalis are used to.”
Jisnu Basu, faculty member at the Saha Institute of Nuclear Physics in Calcutta and an active RSS member, said “West Bengal” had been created to provide a safe space for Bengali Hindus, and its potential unmaking was “actually erasing the last refuge of Bengali Hindus from the subcontinent”.
Saira Shah Halim, social and peace activist and educator, put up a spirited defence of the erstwhile Left rule while stressing the need to keep fundamentalist forces at bay.
She asked if people wanted a “thought police”.
“Or lynchings outside the door, or probably someone to come and check inside the fridge (for) what you are eating for dinner. I think that is not the alternative we are looking at.... No, sorry, that is not the Bengal we want.”