Mamata’s decisive moment

FOR the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), the West Bengal election is like the mid-term elections in the United States. It is a moment when a state that has resisted the saffron tide by stubbornly declining to choose the party, its leader Narendra Modi and the model of the double-engine sarkar that comes with promises of infrastructure upgrades, fast-track clearances for stalled projects and speedy delivery of Central government assistance — must decide what it likes more.The choice for voters is not between the best and the worst; it is a compromise that voters are trying to figure out. There is no denying that the Trinamool Congress as a party, with its capillaries of influence through which the large-scale abuse of power is an everyday reality in rural and urban areas of the densely populated state — is not the best choice in 2026. To be exact, the Trinamool Congress never was the best choice; it was the only alternative in 2011 when it zoomed to power by defeating the crumbling Communist Party of India (Marxist)-led Left Front bastion of 34 uninterrupted years in power.The BJP came out of almost nowhere in West Bengal's intensely competitive politics in the 2019 Lok Sabha election, winning 18 of the 42 parliamentary seats. It snatched victory from the Trinamool Congress which had won an unprecedented 34 seats in the 2014 election. BJP’s entry underscored the immense power of Narendra Modi to appeal to and attract voters. He was what Bengalis, as voters and as a people have always admired, a larger-than-life persona, exuding confidence and exercising power as only a dominant party led by a charismatic leader can.Up against Modi, even Mamata Banerjee's phenomenal charisma and connection to the masses failed in 2019. It was, therefore, a given that the BJP would win and win big in the 2021 state Assembly elections. It did win, but it did not succeed; the party could not oust Mamata Banerjee from power; she won more seats and her third term as chief minister with a two-thirds majority.Since 2019, Mamata has been on high alert. She knew what was coming and she knew she had to fight to defeat the BJP from decimating the Trinamool Congress and eventually cannibalising it, as has happened with other regional parties — as in Maharashtra, where the Sharad Pawar-led Nationalist Congress Party and the Uddhav Thackeray-led Shiv Sena have been reduced to a fragment of their former selves.The 2026 state Assembly election is a decisive moment for Mamata Banerjee's political future and that of the Trinamool Congress. In the first phase of the two-phase election starting on April 23, with 152 seats, millions of voters will decide which party they prefer.The first phase will be trickier for both the defending champion and the aggressive challenger because the majority of the districts where these 152 constituencies are located define the problematic and politically sensitive border between India and Bangladesh. The border and all that it signifies in the BJP's larger politics of purification of the Hindu nation from the evils of the Mughal empire, of a dominant and muscular majority keeping the Muslims in check and firmly under its thumb is at the core of the party's strategy. It wants to attract the Hindu voter by excluding Muslim Bengali participation in the competition to represent the people in West Bengal.Among the districts where the first-phase election will be held is Murshidabad which has 66.27% Muslim voters and the most drastic deletions in the controversial and problem-ridden Special Intensive Revision (SIR) of electoral rolls, the purpose of which, as Home Minister Amit Shah said in Parliament was to "Detect, Delete, Deport." Malda district with 51.27% Muslims, Uttar Dinajpur with 49.92% and Nadia with 26.76%, all bordering Bangladesh, will to go the polls on April 23.These are the districts where the detection and deletion of "ghuspaithiyas" (illegal infiltrators) from Bangladesh as the stated purpose of the SIR and the BJP's narrative of encroachments from across the border, as locations where national security is breached converge. Muslims in these districts are alleged to be giving sanctuary to other Muslims from across the border creating the demographic change caused by the massive influx. The imperative to purify the poll rolls will play out at its most intense and confrontational staging ground in these places.In the 2021 Assembly election, the BJP won the bulk of its 77 seats out of a total of 294 seats in the West Bengal legislature from the 152 seats that will decide its fate and Mamata’s , too, in the first phase in 2026. The BJP is offering voters a corruption-free government and a massive clean-up of the apparatus that abuses power by subverting the authority of the police and the administration. It is offering ‘zero tolerance to ghuspaithiyas’, doubling the direct cash transfers to women and unemployed youth and the usual bouquet of goods and services that is a part of the double-engine model.In contrast, Mamata Banerjee, who knows probably just as well as the BJP, if not better, that there is a strong anti-incumbency sentiment running against her, has used the fiasco over wrongful deletions by the Election Commission during the SIR process( and the mess that it is in now with supplementary lists of voters being released 24 hours before polling begins) to do what she is best at — leading a no-holds barred fight for a cause as the Didi, a champion of the vulnerable and victims of State oppression. The SIR process with its flaws has helped her escape the consequences of the excesses that have fed into the discontent. The BJP's overdone campaign against her and ghuspaithiyas and Muslims and appeasement has polarised Bengali voters.Her political capital is women voters and the so-called Muslim vote bank of 27-28% voters. The BJP's vote bank is Hindu voters hostile to Muslims, including the Matuas, a Schedule Caste community, the Rajbangshis, another SC community, and voters with family histories of arriving in West Bengal as victims of the violence of the Partition. And the volatile chemical reaction between very different ideas of nation, nationhood and nationalism, of which Bengali cultural pride in its ownership of these ideas is as intangible as it is powerful.

Mamata’s decisive moment

Since 2019, Mamata has been on high alert. She knew what was coming and she knew she had to fight to defeat the BJP.

Shikha Mukerjee

Mamata’s decisive moment

Since 2019, Mamata has been on high alert. She knew what was coming and she knew she had to fight to defeat the BJP.

Shikha Mukerjee

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