The wonted tedium of the barren, bitter, bellicose discourse in the political arena of arguably India’s most politicised — indubitably her most politically violent — state was briefly broken on Friday as two foremost foes locked their humour horns over a Bangladesh earthquake, tremors of which were felt in Bengal.

Minutes after the 10.10am, 5.7-magnitude quake emanated from India’s eastern neighbour’s Narsingdi, the BJP’s state unit took to X to post: “West Bengal just felt earthquake tremors.”

“@MamataOfficial, was it because of SIR?” it asked, tongue firmly in cheek, in a jibe at chief minister Mamata Banerjee’s recent propensity to attribute some deaths and certain other phenomena in the state to the special intensive revision (SIR) of the electoral roll. She formally demanded an immediate halt to the SIR in Bengal
on Thursday.

Pat came the reply on X.

“It’s actually the ground shaking beneath the feet of @BJP4Bengal as they stare at an imminent defeat in the 2026 Assembly elections,” wrote the Trinamool Congress. “And don’t worry, the Delhi Zamindars won’t miss it either; the shockwaves will reach them too,” it added.

Although both parties fell back soon after into the familiar drudgery of no-holds-barred hostility that blurs the line of decency almost daily in the city that prides itself on being the cultural capital of India, the momentary exchange of wit was a welcome break from what Bengal politics has sadly sunk to in recent memory.

Veteran politicians, journalists, and political scientists often rue the near-total absence of humour from the current politics of Bengal, some going on to argue that the state of national politics wasn’t any better now.

A senior on the Mamata-led Treasury benches, unwilling to be quoted, recalled how the towering physician-statesman Bidhan Chandra Roy, while he was the Congress’s chief minister, had told then leader of the Opposition, and his fierce Marxist rival, Jyoti Basu: “Don’t shout so much in the Assembly. You will come running to me at night, for medicine.”

The usually dour-faced Basu — who eventually became Bengal’s longest-serving chief minister — had purportedly failed to suppress a smile.

Political scientist Subhamoy Maitra recalled an anecdote made famous by Atal Bihari Vajpayee, of when he, as a young Opposition MP, had fiercely criticised Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru in a heated parliamentary debate.

“I had told Panditji that his personality was mixed in nature, and that there was both a (Winston) Churchill and a (Neville) Chamberlain in him,” Vajpayee had recalled, from his time as a Jana Sangh leader.

“In the evening, I met him at a banquet, and he told me it was a solid speech and walked away smiling,” India’s first BJP Prime Minister had added, highlighting the healthy levels of political discourse, humour, and mutual respect that existed in previous decades of Indian democracy, lamenting the increased acrimony in his
later years.

Maitra said the X exchange between Trinamool and the BJP in the morning was reminiscent of that fondly remembered, near-extinct political culture.

“We experienced in that all too brief social media moment a breath of fresh air, the petrichor of a distinct nostalgia for what we seem to have irrevocably lost. The reason for that is mainly the drastic decline in the presence of intellectuals in our politics,” he said.

“One hopes the tremors of the earthquake — albeit they are serious natural disasters — adequately shook up the grey cells of the political leadership here, to enable them to bring back some such humour in the daily discourse,” added Maitra.