In West Bengal, the real battle is between SIR & anti-incumbency | India News

Defending her base in West Bengal for a fourth term was never going to be easy for Mamata Banerjee, who extended her tenure by five years to 20 years. He was up against a formidable rival, the Bharatiya Janata Party, with its undoubted election-winning organization and vast wealth and its star campaigner Narendra Modi.For five years from 2021, Banerjee was gearing up for a fight to oust him. Incidents such as the rape and murder of a junior doctor working at the state’s RG Kar Medical College and Hospital, the rape of a student on the campus of South Kolkata’s Kasbay college a few meters away from the police station, and a steady stream of incidents of violence against women in rural areas that spontaneously brought to the streets have fueled discontent. He may have taken to the streets to demand justice for the RG car victim, but voters are anti-incumbency.

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In the regular course, Trinamool Congress Its performance as a government should have been under scrutiny. Mamata Banerjee has been Chief Minister for 15 years. Anti-incumbency should have been the main issue.Things change. Instead of being a competitor, BJP A nationwide crackdown turned into a crackdown after another against the Ghuspythiyas – illegal Bengali-speaking immigrants believed to be infiltrators from Bangladesh. The arrests, and even the deportation of some to Bangladesh, where they were trapped and harassed, angered Bengalis, regardless of whether they were loyal to Banerjee, or leaning towards the BJP, as it was the only option against the hegemony and abuse of power. grassroots Congress in daily life experience.The stunning declaration that Bengali is not a language, and the Delhi Police’s search for a “Bangladeshi language” translator, was seen as an attack on Bengali cultural identity, pride and history. The BJP, in Bengali perception, became the party on the offensive, attacking the very concept of Bengaliness: eating fish and meat on days considered significant in traditional religious norms.The 2026 Bengal state assembly election is not meant to be a regular election. It was designed for an all-out crackdown, an exercise in purging the bloated number of ineligible voters, identified as Bengali-speaking – but mostly Muslim – infiltrators from Bangladesh, who were given sanctuary by the Trinamool Congress after 2011, when it was first issued by the Election Commission to vote in special battles. Revision of Bihar Electoral Roll in June 2025, Bengal will be next.The deep resentment that existed among a very large and mixed section of the electorate for CM Banerjee’s Muslim “appeasement” politics seems to have been suppressed by the SIR-judgment-erasure process. Even his temple-building initiative — laying the foundation stone for a Mahakala temple in Digha, or Siliguri, in opposition BJP leader Subvendu Adhikari’s backyard, seems to have faded from the crowd. SIR has become a personal matter for a large number of voters, those adversely affected and others who resent the process of “other” neighbours, friends, colleagues and acquaintances, as one in 10 has been removed or put on trial by the EC.Instead, the political discourse has acquired a new category of electorate labeled “under adjudication”, and it has become so complicated that the Supreme Court has taken the extraordinary step of invoking Article 142 of the Constitution, which empowers it to “pass such decree or order that complete justice be done before 4 lakh people” because 4 lakh people have been tried before it. Following the SIR denied Bengalis the fundamental right to exercise their choice by voting in elections. The EC’s decision to suspend the electoral roll without a hearing was overturned – which Banerjee immediately used as ‘her victory’ for the people.The BJP’s blind defense of the SIR exercise as a necessary intensive and customized process to verify the citizenship status of all voters, Ghuspaithias and eligible citizens, kept its core voters trapped in various districts, adding more than 70 constituencies including the Matuas, a Scheduled Caste community that fled in large numbers after 1971. The objective of SIR was “Detect, Delete, Deport”, as Union Home Minister Amit Shah announced in Parliament.SIR seems to have overtaken anti-incumbency as the main issue in this election. The reason is simple: the effect of SIR is that 91 lakh voters are either deleted or placed under judgment, which is just under 12%; And the number of voters decreased from 7.08 crore to 6.44 crore. The election has turned into a clash between the Trinamool Congress and the EC on the one hand, and the Trinamool Congress and the BJP on the other. As the only party that has consistently supported the implementation of the SIR process and the EC, even after the Supreme Court invoked Article 142 to “do complete justice”, in the perception of a large number of voters, the EC and the BJP are interchangeable entities.Discontent which can be generalized as anti-authority. There is also widespread satisfaction, especially among women, as Banerjee is seen as catering to their needs through direct cash transfer programs like Lakshmi Bhandar and Swasthya Saathi cashless healthcare services. This loyalty is not transactional; It cannot be bought by doubling cash transfers as promised by the BJP under the Lakshmi Bhandar, Matri Shakti Bhorasa scheme. The disproportionate deletion of 57 lakh women from the electoral roll cut into Banerjee’s most loyal vote bank, as more than 50% of women voted for her in the previous elections. This could trigger a swing from him to the BJP as an alternative.The difference between 2021 and now is that the grassroots are not bleeding like they were then; 2021 storm of defections in BJP is over. There has been a reverse flow from the BJP to the Trinamool over the past five years, the most recent and notable being Adhikari’s close aide Pavitra Kar, who is also the Trinamool candidate from Nandigram.Rather than being a contender offering a better alternative, the BJP – with its double-engine model and campaign of “zero tolerance for Ghuspythias” – has become a party that aims to serve Bengal by prioritizing the mobilization of infiltrators from Bangladesh, most of whom it assumes are Muslims, and their deportation. As the campaign progressed, the Home Minister made it clear that once the elections were over, every ineligible voter deleted by the Supreme Court-directed tribunal would be deported.When the context of a state election revolves around matters of succession after significant changes in India’s neighbourhood, and not a simple contest between competing political parties over good governance, politics becomes a contest to strike the most resonant emotional chords. The question is, has the BJP managed to frame the Trinamool as the last and worst offender of legalizing, on a large scale, illegal immigrants from Bangladesh, or has the Trinamool nailed the BJP as “anti-Bengali”? The new variable in the electoral battle is the Swadeshi Bharatiya Secular Front, which won a seat in 2021. The party is now contesting over 30 seats and hopes to wipe out the Muslim and Dalit votes, which it can only do at the expense of the Trinamool.The main rivals, the Trinamool Congress and the BJP, have positioned themselves as champions of Bengali nationhood. In the BJP’s version, the Bengali nation must 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 protected against distortions and mutations that destroy its essence as secular, inclusive and the keeper of the imagined space where the “flow of people” culminates in great humanity.Trinamool Congress’ slogans in the 2026 elections are a claim of how “Bangla” is the victim and how it will emerge victorious: “Jatao koro halma, bar jeetbe bangla (No matter what the attack is, Bengal will win)” is the battle cry. Positioning herself as a champion of Bengal’s identity, including a cultural pride of pluralism and inclusion, Banerjee hopes to work in her favor by burying the perfectly legitimate discontent growing against her local leadership at the grassroots in urban and rural areas.