In poll-bound Bengal, where narratives are birthed and buried breathlessly, Mamata Banerjee has — at least for now — put the bureaucratic nightmare of the special intensive revision (SIR) of poll rolls and the high-decibel Droupadi Murmu “insult” controversy on the backburner to make room for a more volatile, pressing crisis: the cold, metallic dread of an empty LPG cylinder.

Announcing a massive protest march on March 16, the chief minister, famously intuitive in reading the pulse of the masses, has transformed the kitchen panic of households due to the West Asia crisis and the Centre’s “lack of planning” into a potent poll weapon.

Her external approach has been a calculated mix of administrative steel and the signature “Didi” empathy, designed to highlight the Centre’s “incompetence” and contrast it with her willingness to “do anything to help people”.

By Wednesday afternoon, she wasn’t just reading the pulse; she was revising the stakes of the entire poll season even as the BJP derided it as “diversionary drama”.

By Thursday evening, after several high-profile meetings chaired by the chief minister, an SOP was released by Nabanna to keep gas supply as close to normal as possible.

Some Trinamool insiders labelled it the “Iran windfall... straight from the Strait
of Hormuz”.

One of them, a senior in the Assembly Treasury benches, pointed out how Mamata has unleashed multi-pronged activity from various directions on the issue.

“Optics matter. Perception is nearly everything in electoral politics. She is making all the right moves. First, she saturated the airwaves with a scathing indictment of Delhi, drafting a script that blames the Narendra Modi government’s ill-planned, abrupt decisions for preventable panic,” the Trinamool leader said.

“Second, she pivoted to the administrative, revising the stakes by summoning oil company representatives, before emergency huddles with seniors in her administration.”

“Third, she donned her favourite street-fighter avatar, greenlighting a massive procession for Monday, which she would lead from the front, to ensure the gas crisis remains the dominant political currency over the next few days,” he added.

A source deemed close to Mamata said that while the West Asia crisis remains geographically distant, the tumbling of supply chains have sent tremors through the average Bengal household, making the issue more important to voters so close to the election compared to corruption, criminalisation under Trinamool, the RG Kar brutality, or the state of education.

“Her immediate opportunity wasn’t the war or the supply shortage. But the Centre’s decision to stretch the booking window to 25 days in urban centres and 45 days in rural centres translated, in the local imagination, to ‘gas is running out’. Now, the queues outside gas godowns are growing longer, while the automated booking systems and servers are crashing, overwhelmed by the surge in booking attempts,” he said.

Mamata has already said she is willing to give a subsidy, but asked what good is that if there is no supply.

“You display pictures of Narendra Modi at petrol pumps but don’t know your own stock,” she said on Wednesday, not long before she demanded accounting of every cylinder in the state.

She then issued a declaration of fuel-sovereignty: Bengal’s gas stays in Bengal.

“Proper planning, monitoring, and a robust process system should have been put in place... the supply chain is not in our hands. It is all controlled by the Centre,” she
had added.

Politically, the Trinamool machinery has been in overdrive, with fiery speeches by veterans such as Assembly Speaker Biman Banerjee and Calcutta mayor Firhad Hakim and the youth wing’s offline and online banners, all in a build-up to Monday’s
mega protest.

“The Centre may issue ‘no crisis’ assurances from Delhi, but on the streets of Calcutta, the optics tell a different story. Mamata Banerjee knows that in Bengal, the way to a voter’s heart and thumb on the EVM could often begin with the blue flame on the stove,” said a Calcutta-based political analyst. “Remember how she withdrew as a major partner of UPA II (September 2012) at the drop of a hat, a year after coming to power here, primarily over the Manmohan Singh government’s harsh LPG decisions?”