The woman in white buying vegetables does not look like a chief minister. That, of course, is precisely the point. It is past nine on a warm April evening in Bhabanipur, the south Kolkata neighbourhood where Mamata Banerjee was born, and lives in a two-room house, and has now come to fight, for the third consecutive time, for her political birthright. The crowd surrounding her is not the choreographed kind. You can tell. The faces are too excited, too lit from within. The vegetable seller, a local woman of indeterminate middle age, grins at Mamata Banerjee like a teenager. In the allegorical theatre of Indian electoral politics, symbolism is the only currency that never inflates. A fruit seller presses a box of mangoes into Didi’s hands. She refuses, then relents and accepts one. One mango. The detail is so perfectly calibrated, so exquisitely Bengali in its domestic frugality that you have to remind yourself it is happening on a campaign trail, not in a kitchen. “This is the difference between her and Modi,” says Hiran Majumdar, who manages the constituency, with the serene confidence of a man who believes Bengal has already endorsed his argument. “Narendra Modi eats jhalmuri in a fully stuffed shop for a pre-arranged photo op. Didi buys vegetables from a roadside stall.” Mamata Banerjee is not merely campaigning here. She is claiming ground.
Bhabanipur is also where Suvendu Adhikari—her former protégé, now her most implacable tormentor—held a rally the previous evening. He is the man who bested her in Nandigram in 2021, the wound she has never publicly acknowledged and cannot stop picking at. This time, he has come for her on her own street, in her own constituency, with the easy confidence of a man who believes he has both God and Amit Shah on his side. Nandigram is where Mamata’s political career was reborn, and Bhabanipur is where she was born and lives, even after becoming the CM. Suvendu looks every inch a man at war. Going by the warmth of the greeting he receives on stage—“Swagatha, swagatham, Suvenduda swagatham”—and the composition of the men on stage, there is a certain resonant quality about him. Bhabanipur is a small constituency with a big chunk of different faiths: Bengali Hindus, Muslims, Sikhs, Marwaris, and also migrants from Odisha, Jharkhand, and Bihar; the stage is representative of the place except for the absence of Muslims. Suvendu’s speech emphasises on one of the BJP’s main planks—protect women, end TMC rule, and bring Sanatan Dharma to Bengal. It is a no-holds-barred war in which Suvendu could maybe come close to winning. The crowd at Suvendu’s rally that night was worked up by a speaker named Mohan Patel, a tall, athletic, conspicuously bearded figure, who rolled up his sleeves and delivered his warning—“Hindus would become a persecuted minority at the mercy of Muslims.” The speech was entirely in Hindi, in a city that has composed its most important thoughts in Bengali for three centuries. The assembly roared, “Bharat Mata ki jai,” and “Jai Shri Ram” in response. Nobody seemed to notice his language. That same evening a Mamata rally was going on in a parallel street; it was disrupted by BJP volunteers turning the blaring loudspeakers in her direction. The CM left, calling her walk-out an act of resistance. Those two nights at Bhabanipur brought in the essential difference between TMC’s Bengal-ism and BJP’s idea of Bharat. This is the essential grammar of the 2026 Bengal Assembly elections: the BJP’s Shri Ram taking on the TMC’s Joi Bangla—pan-Indian Hindu nationalism versus exclusive Bengali cultural identity. Delhi’s idea of what India should be versus a three-term chief minister’s insistence that Bengal is not a province of India so much as a civilisation that has graciously agreed to share a border with it. Modi speaks at Bengal. Mamata speaks from it. The distinction is not rhetorical. It is everything.
To understand Bengali politics, you must first understand the bohiragato—the outsider. Bengal’s relationship with the rest of India has always been marked by a proud, sometimes ferociously prickly sense of cultural distinction. This is, after all, the land of Tagore and Nazrul Islam, of Satyajit Ray and Subhas Chandra Bose, of a Renaissance that preceded Indian independence and in many ways made it imaginable. Bengalis believe, not without evidence, that they invented modern Indian intellectual life and a cuisine so precisely regional that the distinction between ilish and chital is not a food preference, but a declaration of who you are and where you come from. The consequence of this pride is a deep, instinctive suspicion of the outsider who arrives, however well-intentioned, to tell Bengal what Bengal should be. The Left understood this and draped its ideology in Bengali cultural attire for 34 years. Mamata Banerjee understood it even better and weaponised it into something more raw and personal. The BJP, relatively new to the state’s complicated emotional weather, has repeatedly underestimated it and paid the price. The TMC masterstroke in 2021 was not any single policy or personality. It was a slogan ‘Bangla Nijer Meyekei Chai’—Bengal Wants Its Own Daughter. The BJP campaign that year was led largely by leaders parachuted in from Delhi and Uttar Pradesh, whose sloganeering about Ram and borders landed in Bengal like a foreigner’s mispronunciation—technically legible, tonally catastrophic. The result was 213 seats for the TMC, 77 for the BJP: a rout so complete it prompted, by all accounts, a brutally honest internal post-mortem.
The BJP is not an organisation that repeats its mistakes without attempting, at minimum, to theorise its way out of them. Its 2026 campaign represents the most deliberate act of cultural repositioning the party has ever attempted in Bengal. The party has begun invoking not just Jai Shri Ram but also Jai Ma Kali and Jai Ma Durga. It has poached the legacies of Tagore, Vivekananda, Chaitanya Mahaprabhu, and the Rajbongshi icon, Thakur Panchanan Barma. Anurag Thakur ate fish on camera. These are the gestures of a party that has done its homework, or at least hired someone who has. The BJP seemed to have learnt its lesson. It faces formidable odds this time: anger at SIR, en-masse voting by Muslims, a large-scale women’s vote and the presence of Central Forces. It is a matter of electoral pride and a historical hope; quoting the BJP’s subtle master of strategy BL Santhosh, on loan from the RSS—“Bengal is not just an election, it is ideological war.” Winning Bengal is even more important: this year is the 50th birth centenary of the Jan Sangh, Hindutva’s original fount. He may get his wish. There is something the TMC may be underestimating: Bengali voters are sophisticated enough to separate a party’s cultural performance from its governance promises. Some of them, exhausted by 15 years of the same administration, may be willing to accept an imperfect cultural conversion. The BJP has used a judo move of some cunning which pits Bengali identity politics against Bengali ‘outsider’ politics. While Modi and Shah pitch this narrative stridently, its low-key poll management by Bhupender Yadav and the RSS cannot be underestimated. Yadav has over the last many months hardly spent any time in Delhi to attend to the Environment Ministry he heads. Instead, he travelled throughout Bengal, visiting every constituency, talking to the cadres, and assessing vote arithmetic. Meanwhile, the RSS, which has been quietly and efficiently working in rural Bengal, sent groups of about 1,500 men from very state to fan out to village after village, carrying the Hindutva message of national unity endangered by Islamic infiltration. “It is immaterial Bupenderji doesn’t speak Bengali. He doesn’t speak Odia either, but he delivered Odisha to the BJP,” says a Central minister at the BJP’s Salt Lake office.
Four is the number that haunts Indian rightist political scientists like a ghost that refuses to acknowledge the living truth. It was the BJP’s vote share, in percentage, in West Bengal’s 2011 Assembly elections. A decade later, that number became 40. The party had not merely grown in Bengal. It had detonated. What happened between 2011 and 2021 cannot be attributed to any single cause. It was not a Modi wave, not a Hindu awakening, not a grassroots uprising. It was all three, simultaneously, on different registers, like instruments in an orchestra that had been rehearsing in separate rooms for years and suddenly found themselves in the same concert hall. The RSS growth figures are, if accurate, extraordinary. According to the organisation’s own spokesperson, fewer than 900 active shakha milans and mandalis operated in West Bengal when Mamata came to power in 2011. By early 2024, that number had risen to over 4,500. The organisation’s stated ambition: 8,000 before these elections. A top BJP youth leader, who is in charge of Howrah, is optimistic. Howrah has about 40 per cent Muslim votes. He is unfazed. “Whether they vote for us or not, we will sweep.”
The single most politically decisive policy lever of this era was the Citizenship Amendment Act of 2019. The Matua community—non-Muslim refugees from erstwhile East Pakistan and Bangladesh—with a population estimated at over 10 million by the All India Matua Mahasangha, had lived for generations with uncertain citizenship status. The CAA, which fast-tracked citizenship for non-Muslim immigrants from neighbouring countries, was read by its supporters as long-overdue justice and by its opponents as deliberate communal engineering. In Bengal, it was both. Post-poll analysis by multiple outlets documented that Matua and refugee-dominated constituencies accounted for more than half of the BJP’s 77-seat haul in 2021. And then Sitalkuchi happened. On April 10, 2021, central security forces shot dead four people at a polling booth. The BJP’s response, ranging from silence to what many observers characterised as implicit endorsement, effectively closed whatever residual space the party had among Muslim voters, who constitute roughly 30 per cent of Bengal’s electorate. They voted with near-total consolidation for the TMC as they will do now. The BJP made the cardinal error of assuming ‘Hindu’ was a monolith. The Bengali Hindu who lights incense before Ma Kali and reads Tagore does not experience his religion the way a voter in Lucknow or Unnao does.
The Bangladesh border stretches for 2,200 km through West Bengal’s most intimate geography: through rice fields and fishing villages and market towns where families on either side share surnames, recipes, and in some cases, grandparents, too. Prime Minister Modi has raised the infiltration pitch at rally after rally, warning of demographic change, demanding that Bengal’s borders and demography be protected. The argument plays brilliantly in Kolkata drawing rooms and at rallies in the Gangetic belt. In the actual borderlands, people are living the more complicated truth of coexistence so old it predates the very concept of the international boundary it supposedly crosses. In Murshidabad, barely 5 hours and 200-odd km away from Kolkata, the violence is over with the voting and the eerie calm of uneasy expectation prevails. Bombs have been thrown, people have died, and there is a calm before the storm or the storm after the calm. Bengali labourers working in the South, especially in Kerala, who are mostly Muslims, have travelled even by bus for four days in the summer heat to vote TMC. The SIR may have rebounded against BJP because of the real fear among both Hindus and Muslims throughout Bengal; they are afraid of being disenfranchised and are now determined to vote for Didi. And yet, the atmosphere of insecurity is real. Bangladesh’s interim administration displayed a map claiming West Bengal as part of ‘Greater Bangladesh’, which genuinely rattled Bengali Hindus across the political spectrum. The BJP amplified, focused, and politically instrumentalised it to an extraordinary degree—which is, of course, what political parties do with genuine anxieties, and which is also precisely why it is difficult to argue with.
Drive north out of Kolkata on an April morning and the city peels away slowly, reluctantly, the way Bengal always does—on its own terms, in its own time. The apartment blocks with grill-covered windows thin out. The hoardings multiply. Then, somewhere past Barrackpore, the rice fields appear, and you are suddenly, unmistakably, in the Bengal that has existed for a thousand years before any politician put their name on a wall. And on every wall, every tin shed, every crumbling colonial archway—there are two faces: Mamata Banerjee’s, in a white sari and defiant expression, and Narendra Modi’s, in the saffron glow that has come to mean something very specific in India’s political vocabulary. In Kolkata, Modi’s imperial drive along the barricaded Central Avenue was a majestic masterpiece of optics. Dressed in a blue silk waistcoat, face lit from within his moving vehicle, he waved and smiled at the crowds lining his passage with the particular benevolence of a figure who has learned to perform his own mythology without self-consciousness. An old woman in a new red sari—you understood it was new because she was wearing it so carefully—said with a toothless smile: “I came just to see Modi. One glimpse would be enough. I can die peacefully after that.” It would be politically foolish, and perhaps humanly uncharitable, to underestimate the sincerity of what she felt. Mamata, by contrast, walked 14 miles from Santoshpur to Hazra on the last day of campaigning. No barricades. No security cordon. Just crowds, and the oxygen of popular devotion. The BJP has caught on to the importance of direct connect: adoration doesn’t come easy for the outsider. In Bengal, a campaign is also a cultural performance, and the casting matters as much as the script. Amit Shah, who is certain BJP will get 150 seats in South Bengal, has deviated from script; this time he took selfies with children and interacted directly with the crowd. Distance has always been an issue at Bengal rallies, with cordons separating Delhi leaders from the people. This doesn’t apply to showbiz. This poll cycle, both parties have largely stepped back from the mass deployment of Tollywood talent in favour of what one could call experienced star soldiers: TMC had Koel Mallick, the ‘Tolly Queen’; Sayantika Banerjee, defending her seat in Baranagar; Shrreya Pandey, the youngest candidate, who begins each day with a morning puja at a local Kali temple before knocking on doors through the narrow lanes of Maniktala. But the undisputed revelation of this campaign, the figure who has surprised even the party’s own insiders, is Saayoni Ghosh—former actress, sitting MP from Jadavpur, and a performer in the oldest, most demanding sense of that word. She draws massive crowds. She sings. She puns in three languages. Dressed in cotton saris with her hair pulled up in a casual bun, she sings the popular film song to rapturous audiences—“The BJP will plead with you, ‘Vada karo nahin chodoge tum mera saath’, and then you’ll ask them after the election is over, ‘Kya hua tera vada?’.” She wipes a little girl’s sweaty face with the pallu of her sari. She does high-fives with young men who have queued for an hour to see her. She is 33 years old, and she is, unmistakably, a political star in the making. The BJP has dispatched Smriti Irani and Kangana Ranaut, both delivering warnings about the safety of Bengal’s women. Rupa Ganguly, the Rajya Sabha MP and veteran of televised mythology, stumps from Solapur on development and women’s safety—a sensible, if unglamorous, pitch. The saffron campaign has made women’s safety its signature issue. It is an argument that lands somewhat awkwardly given that Mamata Banerjee has sent an unprecedented proportion of women candidates—around 38 per cent of her total MPs—to Parliament, and has built her welfare architecture around female voters: Lakshmir Bhandar, which provides direct cash transfers to female household heads; Kanyashree and Swasthya Sathi are pillars of her popularity. “The Centre’s women’s safety pitch,” one woman voter in Howrah said, with the finality of someone who has considered and dismissed an argument, “is too little, too late.” The BJP’s own strategists can on their best days resolve this with certainty: is the winning card the energy behind the BJP ideological Hindutva, or is it simply exhaustion with 15 years of the same state administration? The two are, of course, not mutually exclusive. But they demand different responses, and the TMC has perhaps not fully reckoned with which one it is facing in which neighbourhood. The anti-incumbency is not abstract. The West Bengal Civil Services examination—the gateway to the most lucrative state government jobs—has been in administrative limbo since 2023, with previous years’ results still unreleased. The West Bengal Forest Service exam has not been conducted since 2018. Several state PSUs have not recruited engineers since 2019. For the young, educated, aspirational Bengali in Barasat or Krishnanagar, this is not a policy debate. It is a closed door. The rape and murder of a young woman doctor in a North Kolkata hospital and the subsequent partisan handling of the case shook public confidence in ways that welfare transfers cannot paper over.
Upendra, who owns a grocery shop in the Kalighat area, believes “someone must apply the brakes to Mamata’s power.” But he will vote Congress, like his “family has always done”.
Mondal, all of 90 years old, a former taxi driver living in a small house in Beleghata, was clear that “I’ll vote Marxist. My grandfather worked for the white man. He would have, too.”
A Hindu labourer in Murshidabad says, “Our family has lived here for three generations. My uncle was thrown out of the voter list. If BJP comes to power, we’ll lose our votes too. We are safe only with Didi.”
Priyanka, who works with a computer firm in Chittaranjan Avenue, however, wants to give the BJP a chance. “I want to vote for change,” she says.
Mamata Banerjee’s own psychology in this campaign is more feral and personal than any conventional electoral calculus can capture. TMC has reinvented its Didi as a lone Bengali woman taking on the might of the Indian state. This image resonates with the women who dominate the state’s mythology, hagiography, literature, and even the way of life. She is conducting, in her own phrase, ajibaner lorai—a fight for life. When Modi addressed the nation on the Women’s Reservation Bill, Mamata accused the Centre of using women’s reservation as a cover for delimitation. Mamata is genuinely dangerous as a political opponent even in her most vulnerable moments. Her Bengali is kitchen-table Bengali, not textbook Bengali. Her saris are the colour of mourning and simplicity, worn with the unconscious ease of a woman who has never once thought about what she is wearing; because she has always known. Her anger is always personal. And when she cries at a rally—which she does, regularly, without apology—it is impossible to know whether it is performance or authenticity, which is perhaps the honest definition of Bengal’s great political theatre.
At first sight, Gyanesh Kumar’s ostensibly pro-BJP moves could backfire. In many constituencies, harassed jawans fled from aggressive stone-throwing by TMC workers. Accused of favouring BJP polling agents and delaying voting in TMC-heavy booths, the over two lakh uniformed men and women posted in Bengal are in a quandary. But they do not hesitate to intimidate TMC’s senior leaders. Two days before polling in Kolkata, a large BSF contingent landed up at the residence of Farhad Hakim, the Kolkata Mayor and Minister of Urban Development. The officer-in-charge, accompanied by a posse of uniformed soldiers, demanded to be let in. Hakim chose to go out and confront him instead. “They tried to intimidate me,” he said. “The officer warned me that they had intelligence that young TMC volunteers are roaming about the area and I should keep them in check. This bullying is unacceptable.” A BJP defeat would setback an ancient ambition of reclaiming Bengal’s identity from its erstwhile British and Islamic conquerors. For Mamata, defeat would not simply end her chief ministership, it would likely end her aspirations of playing kingmaker—or queen—in any future national coalition. “Didi cannot survive five years in opposition,” confesses one TMC leader. “The party will simply melt away.” The enthusiasm of the TMC cadre is worrying the BJP; a Kolkata businessman is certain of a Didi victory, “There is no one other than TMC cadres who best know what is actually happening on the ground. Most of them are goons who migrated to Trinamool from the Left. If they sensed a BJP win, they would have fled and joined, or at least tried to join the BJP. These guys aren’t drinking anyone’s Kool Aid.” Groups of 250 volunteers, each on motorcycles, accompany ballot boxes to strong rooms to ensure these are neither changed nor tampered with.
The sideshow of any election is amateur psephology. Seat prediction is a favourite pastime with all informed or self-informed soothsayers, such as politicians and bureaucrats. A former Chief Secretary’s calculation is around 200 seats for TMC. An IAS officer close to Didi is giving BJP less than 60 seats, which seemed like wishful thinking. A BJP leader who just returned from poll duty in Bengal chalks it up to 140. TMC’s internal assessment is confident of winning at the worst, 150 seats, and the best, 244. In what looks like a close fight, the answer is an average of 140-160 for TMC, and between 120-130 for BJP. But Bengal has a way of defying forecasts. It is a state of poets and revolutionaries and of people who take politics personally in the way others take cricket. The Nawab fell at Plassey because his general kept his troops in their tents while the battle was decided around them. The Marxists fell in 2011 because they could no longer distinguish between the party’s interest and the people’s. Mamata rose because she knew, viscerally and from decades of being dismissed and underestimated, that in Bengali politics, emotional connection is everything. The moment you lose it, no amount of welfare spending buys it back. The decade-long assumption—that Mamata was invincible and Bengal’s complexity would always confound outside challengers—has cracked. Not broken, perhaps. But cracked. And in the old buildings of Kolkata that stand at the corner of every street, beautiful and crumbling and full of stories, they have never told anyone who came later, you can see precisely what happens to the things that crack. Something is being decided in the mustard-yellow afternoons of Hooghly and the tin-roofed villages of Murshidabad that no poll can fully capture: whether enough Bengalis believe their Didi still has the fire, or whether, after 15 years, it is simply time. These are the two oldest questions in politics, and Bengal, which has been asking them of its leaders since before most of India’s current political vocabulary existed, asks their wayward gods with severity. On the morning of May 4, Bengal will know.
With inputs from Kunal Chatterjee