For Narendra Modi, Singur is not just a place on the map; it is a metaphor of conquest. It marks the location where his politics of speed, decisiveness and industrial promise collided with Communist Bengal’s politics of violence in 2008. When Ratan Tata withdrew the Nano project from Singur in 2008, saying he could not work “with a gun to his head”, Modi sent Tata a one-word SMS, “Welcome”. Where Bengal agonised, Gujarat acted. Now as Mamata Banerjee fights on the streets, Singur has returned as a ghost in Bengal’s electoral imagination. Modi now speaks of paribartan, the very slogan Mamata used to dethrone the Left. Her paribartan was visceral, coming with mud on her sandals, wounds on her feet, hunger strikes and confrontations. It was emotional, impulsive and deeply Bengali. This is why her theatrics still work. When she recently barged into the home of I-PAC director Pratik Jain during ED raids and walked out clutching a green file to her chest, claiming it contained confidential electoral information of the Trinamool Congress, hers was more than defiance of an institution. It was the invocation of a Bengali female archetype that predates the Indian state itself: the woman who challenges imperial authority with embodied rebellion. Pritilata Waddedar, the “Iron Lady of Bengal,” took cyanide and died—after leading a 1932 armed attack on the Pahartali European Club in Chittagong, which had a sign “Dogs and Indians are not allowed”—because she refused to be arrested. Teenagers Shanti Ghosh and Suniti Chowdhury assassinated the British District Magistrate of Comilla. Mamata projects New Delhi as an imperial prototype that has persecuted Bengal forever; it is theatrical, yes. But Bengal understands theatre. Modi’s theatre is grand, masculine, centralised, wrapped in the language of development and destiny. Bengal has always lived at the intersection of mysticism and rebellion.
What’s looming is not an election; it is a philosophical collision. Nowhere is this collision sharper than in the BJP’s appropriation of Subhas Chandra Bose as its Bengali mascot. Netaji is Bengal’s most enduring political icon, its unbroken masculine myth, and the “real hero” of the freedom struggle who militarised Indian nationalism. Yet sections of the Left historically saw him as a “fascist enabler,” disturbed by his alliances with Hitler and Japan. Now BJP seeks to nationalise him, make him a Hindu icon and re-code his rebellion into its civilisational narrative. But Netaji was never Hindutva. He represented militant nationalism, sure, but secular, plural, modernist. His India was not a religious project, it was a sovereign one. The BJP’s Bengal project is an attempt to simplify this complexity by replacing the layered, argumentative, multilingual, syncretic Bengali identity with a more uniform, emotionally mobilised Hindu identity. But Bengali Hinduism has never been uniform. It has been shaped by the Bauls, by Sufis, by Shakti traditions, by Vaishnava mystics, by reformers and rebels. Does the BJP truly identify with the Hinduism of Vivekananda who ate meat, smoked, challenged orthodoxy, and spoke of universal tolerance? Or does it prefer a curated, sanitised version of Hindu identity that is easier to mobilise electorally? Vivekananda’s Hinduism was expansive; Hindutva’s is often exclusive. Vivekananda spoke of strength through spiritual openness; Hindutva speaks of strength through cultural consolidation.
The BJP is not just fighting Mamata Banerjee. It is fighting the Bengali mind itself: its resistance to absolutism, its refusal to accept one narrative as final, its love for debate and dissent. Every time BJP tries to nationalise Bengal, Bengal instinctively regionalises itself. Every time Delhi asserts certainty, Kolkata asserts ambiguity. You cannot parachute a North Indian template of nationalism into a land that worships its poets as prophets and its rebels as saints. You cannot replace Rabindranath’s humanism with a homogenised religious fervour and expect cultural surrender. This stand-off is not between two parties but between two imaginations of India. One imagination sees paribartan as alignment, obedience, uniformity while the other sees development as dignity, argument, difference. Modi wants Bengal to become part of a grand Hindu civilisational resurgence. Mamata wants Bengal to remain Bengal first, India second, ideology third. In India’s War of Civilisations, will the Bengal of Aurobindo rise again, seeking spiritual universality beyond political borders? Or will the fire of hanged martyr Khudiram Bose who fought the British continue to burn, fierce, local, and uncompromising? Perhaps Bengal, as always, will refuse the choice. It will remain a land where spirituality and rebellion coexist, where faith does not cancel doubt, and identity does not erase plurality. This is why Hindutva faces its hardest test here this year. Not because Bengalis are less Hindu, but because they are too Hindu in a way that refuses uniformity. They belong to a civilisation that cannot be disciplined into a single emotional register.
Singur was never just about a factory. It was about who gets to define progress. Today, Bengal asks again: is progress submission to power, or resistance against cultural adulteration?