Rahul Gandhi landed in Calcutta to campaign for Congress nominees in Bengal after a decade on Saturday. The last time he had come to campaign for the Bengal Assembly election was on April 27, 2016. Rahul, then the national vice president of the Congress, had shared the dais with Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee, the late former chief minister.

On Saturday, in the short speech that he made at the Shahid Minar ground in the presence of 55 nominees from the Congress for the second and final phase of polling on April 29 when 142 constituencies will vote, Rahul picked up the same brush that he had used a decade ago. A direct attack on Narendra Modi – “truth is in Epstein files” and Trump has Modi “by the neck” – and the Congress’s INDIA alliance partner and Bengal chief minister Mamata Banerjee.

“They are doing the same thing. In the rest of the country, Narendra Modi is busy closing down industries; Mamata di is doing the same here. In the rest of the country the BJP attacks, jails our party workers, the Trinamool Congress does the same in Bengal,” Rahul told the crowd on Saturday evening.

In 2016 the Left and the Congress had fought the elections together for the first time ever with a formal seat-sharing arrangement. The experiment did not work. The Congress ended with 44 members in the 294-member Assembly and the Left bagged 34 seats, while the Trinamool on its own reached 2011.

Since Rahul’s last campaign, the political landscape of Bengal has changed vastly.

Having spent five years without a single representative in the Assembly and only one from Bengal in the Lok Sabha, the Congress in this poll season is the only party to have fielded candidates in all 294 seats in Bengal.

The BJP is far stronger in 2026 than from a decade ago when it could manage only three legislators to the Assembly.

The Left-Congress alliance still had a combined vote share of 39.2 per cent, 5.7 points short of the victorious Trinamool.

In these 10 years, the votes of the two parties that led the government for decades in Bengal could manage just 11 per cent of the votes, with massive erosion in their ranks.

Rahul’s address in the Park Circus Maidan 10 years ago, which marked the first ever public collaboration with a CPM leader, was a grand occasion for the Bengal Congress then.

Then Bengal president Adhir Ranjan Chowdhury, who has always been an advocate for an alliance with the Left, was at the venue and had made the welcome speech.

Chowdhury, who contested in the Assembly elections this time after three decades, was conspicuous by his absence on Saturday.

“Adhir da is campaigning in the districts which will go to polls and could not come to Calcutta,” said a Congress leader.

In the run-up to the 2026 Bengal polls, Mamata has refrained from attacking the Congress except in some pockets of Malda and Murshidabad where the grand old party still has some presence.

Instead, the Trinamool has gathered leaders from other members of the INDIA bloc to prove its might in Bengal as well as in the Opposition.

RJD leader and Bihar former deputy chief minister Tejashwi Yadav campaigned for Trinamool nominees in neighbouring North 24-Parganas’ industrial belt – Barrackpore, Khardaha and Noapara – on Friday. All these constituencies have sizeable Hindi-speaking populations, mostly from neighbouring Bihar and Jharkhand.

On Saturday, Tejashwi campaigned for the Trinamool in North 24-Parganas Baranagar, North Calcutta’s Jorasanko and Rashbihari Assembly in the south.

Jharkhand chief minister Hemant Soren was in Hooghly’s Bhadreswar, part of the Chandernagore constituency, and Rishra in the Serampore Assembly where Rahul addressed his first meeting of the day.

Former Delhi chief minister Arvind Kejriwal will land in Calcutta later Saturday to campaign for Mamata Banerjee’s party.

“The Congress is inconsequential in Calcutta and the adjoining districts,” said a Trinamool leader on Rahul Gandhi’s visit. “Mamata di’s victory in the Assembly elections against all the tricks pulled by the BJP will put her in the position of the undisputed leader of the Opposition nationally.

“This election will prove what we have been saying all along. Not Rahul Gandhi or the Congress, only Didi can defeat the BJP.”