Voices Anand Neelakantan Preeti Shenoy Dinesh Singh Ravi Shankar Dr Deepali Bhardwaj Swami Sukhabodhananda MAGAZINE Buffet People Wellness Books Food Art & Culture Entertainment NEW DELHI may 3 2026 SUNDAY PAGES 12 Mamata Banerjee Her Last Stand Mamata Banerjee is conducting, in her own phrase, ajibaner lorai—a fight for life, against her most formidable foe, the BJP. A Mamata loss will end her career, and a saffron victory will decide the shape of a Hindu Bengal Narendra Modi T By Ravi Shankar he 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 Santosh, 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 manage, ment 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 Bupend- The BJP has warned that Hindus risk becoming a disenfranchised community in their own homeland—a judo move of some cunning which uses Bengali identity politics against Bengali ‘outsider’ politics. Modi and Shah are pitching this narrative stridently erji 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 refugeeTurn to page 2