.
Defending her bastion of West Bengal for the fourth time to extend her term by another five years to 20 years was never meant to be easy for Mamata Banerjee. She was up against a formidable challenger, the Bharatiya Janata Party, its redoubtable election-winning organisation and bottomless resources and its star campaigner, Narendra Modi.For five years from 2021, Banerjee had been preparing for the fight to unseat her. Incidents that brought people spontaneously out into the streets like the rape and murder of a junior doctor working at the staterun R G Kar Medical College and Hospital, the rape of a student inside the college premises in Kasba, in south Kolkata, metres from the police station and a continuous flow of incidents of violence against women in rural areas had resulted in a spike in the prevailing discontent. She may have hit the streets to demand justice for the R G Kar victim, but that did not cut ice with voters nursing anti-incumbency sentiments.
.
In the regular course, Trinamool Congress should have been in the dock over its performance as a govt. Mamata Banerjee has been chief minister for 15 years. Anti-incumbency should have been the principal issue.Things changed. Instead of being a challenger, BJP metamorphosed into an oppressor, after the countrywide crackdown on ghuspaithiyas — illegal Bengali-speaking immigrants, presumed to be infiltrators from Bangladesh. The arrests, even deportation of some to Bangladesh, where they were stranded and harassed, angered Bengalis, regardless of whether they were Banerjee loyalists, or veering to the BJP, because it was the only alternative against the dominance and abuse of power of the Trinamool Congress in everyday lived experiences. The stunning declaration that Bengali was not a language, and Delhi Police’s search for a translator of the “Bangladeshi language” was perceived as an assault on the cultural identity, pride and history of Bengalis. BJP, in Bengali perception, became the party involved in the assault, attacking the idea of Bengalihood: eating fish and meat on days that were considered significant to the codes of Sanatan Dharma.The 2026 Bengal state assembly election was not meant to be a regular election. It was designed to be a once-and-for-all confrontation, an exercise in purification of the inflated numbers of ineligible voters, identifiable as Bengali-speaking — but mostly Muslim — infiltrators from Bangladesh, who had been given sanctuary by the Trinamool Congress after 2011, when it was first voted in. The Election Commission issued warnings, even as it kicked off the Special Intensive Revision of electoral rolls in Bihar in June 2025, that Bengal would be next.What was deep-seated resentment among a very large and mixed section of voters over CM Banerjee’s Muslim “appeasement” politics seems to have been buried by the SIR-adjudication-deletion process. Even her temple construction zeal — the Jagannath Dham in Digha in BJP leader of the opposition Suvendu Adhikari’s backyard, or her laying the foundation for a Mahakaal temple in Siliguri, seems to have faded from the public sphere. SIR has become a personal issue for an overwhelming number of voters, those adversely impacted and others who are upset over the process of “othering” neighbours, friends, colleagues and acquaintances, because one in 10 people has been deleted or put under adjudication by the EC.Instead, the political discourse acquired a new classification of voters labelled “under adjudication”, and that has got so complicated that the Supreme Court took the extraordinary step of invoking Article 142 of the Constitution, which grants it the power to “pass such decree or make such order as is necessary for doing complete justice in any cause or matter pending before it”, because 34.45 lakh people were being denied the fundamental right to exercise their choice through casting their vote in the Bengal election, following SIR. The EC’s decision to freeze electoral rolls without carrying out hearings has been overturned — which Banerjee has promptly appropriated as ‘her victory’ on behalf of the people.BJP’s blind defence of the SIR exercise as a necessary intensive and customised process to verify the citizenship status of all voters, ghuspaithiyas and eligible citizens, left its core voters stranded in several districts, adding up to over 70 constituencies, including the Matuas, a Schedule Caste community that fled in large numbers after 1971. The purpose of SIR, as Union home minister Amit Shah declared in Parliament, was “Detect, delete, deport”.SIR seems to have overtaken anti-incumbency as the principal issue in this election. The reason is simple: the effect of SIR is that 91 lakh voters have been either deleted or put under adjudication, that is just under 12%; and the number of voters has declined to 6.44 crore from 7.08 crore. The election has turned into a confrontation between Trinamool Congress and the EC on the one hand, and Trinamool Congress and BJP on the other. As the only party that has consistently supported the SIR process and the EC’s implementation, even after the Supreme Court invoked Article 142 for the purpose of “doing complete justice”, in the perception of large numbers of voters, the EC and the BJP are interchangeable entities.Discontent that can be generalised as anti-incumbency exists. There is also widespread satisfaction, especially among women, because Banerjee is perceived as one who caters to their needs, through direct cash transfer programmes like the Lakshmir Bhandar and Swasthya Sathi cashless healthcare services. This loyalty is not transactional; it cannot be bought off by doubling the cash transfer as promised by BJP under the renamed Lakshmir Bhandar, the Matri Shakti Bharosa Scheme. The disproportionate deletions of 57 lakh women from the electoral roll cuts into Banerjee’s most loyal vote bank, since over 50% of women have voted for her in preceding elections. It may trigger the swing away from her to BJP, as the alternative.The difference between 2021 and now is that Trinamool is no longer haemorrhaging as it was then; the spate of defections to BJP in 2021 has ended. There has been a reverse flow from BJP to the Trinamool over the past five years, the most recent and significant being Adhikari’s close aide Pabitra Kar, who is also a Trinamool candidate from Nandigram.Instead of being a challenger offering a better alternative, BJP — with its double-engine model and its campaign on “zero tolerance for ghuspaithiyas ” — has become the party that aims to serve Bengal by prioritising the rounding up of infiltrators from Bangladesh, the majority of whom are Muslims in its estimate, and deporting them. As the campaign has progressed, the home minister has made it clear that once the election is over, every ineligible voter, deleted by the tribunal set up on the orders of Supreme Court, will be deported.When the context for a state election is about legacy issues carried over after momentous changes in India’s neighbourhood and not a straightforward contest between competing political parties about better governance, politics becomes a competition in striking the most resonant sentimental chords. The question is, has BJP been able to frame Trinamool as the last and worst perpetrator of legitimising, on a large scale, illegal immigrants from Bangladesh, or has Trinamool nailed BJP for being “anti-Bengali”? The new variable in the electoral fight is the home-grown Indian Secular Front, which won one seat in 2021. The party is now contesting in over 30 seats and expects to shave off Muslim and Dalit votes, which it can do only at Trinamool’s cost.The principal rivals, Trinamool Congress and BJP, have positioned themselves as champions of Bengali nationhood. In BJP’s version, the Bengali nation needs to be cleansed of Muslims from Bangladesh, who have been illegally granted sanctuary and pose a threat to the Hindu majority. In Trinamool’s version, the idea of Bengal/India, shaped by generations of Bengali nationalist leaders, who contributed to the narrative and politics of the freedom struggle, needs to be defended against distortions and mutations that destroy its essence as secular, inclusive and custodian of that imagined space where “streams of humans” end up mingling in the ocean of great humanity.The Trinamool Congress slogans in the 2026 election are assertions of how “Bangla” is the victim and how it shall triumph: “ Jataoi koro hamla, abar jitbe Bangla (No matter how many attacks, Bengal will win)” is the war cry. By positioning herself as the champion of Bangla’s identity, which includes its cultural pride in being plural and inclusive, Banerjee hopes to make sentiment work in her favour, burying the entirely valid discontent that has grown against her local leadership at the grassroots in urban and rural areas. Go to Source
