In West Bengal, the real battle is between SIR and SIR. anti-incumbency

Defending the bastion of West Bengal for the fourth time and extending her tenure for another five to 20 years will not be easy for Mamata Banerjee. She faces a formidable challenger, the Bharatiya Janata Party, with its formidable election-winning organization and inexhaustible resources, and its star campaigner, Narendra Modi.For five years starting in 2021, Banerjee has been preparing for a fight to oust her. Incidents of people taking to the streets spontaneously, such as the rape and murder of a junior doctor at the state-run RG Kar Medical College and Hospital, the rape of a student on the college campus in Kasbah, south Kolkata, just meters away from a police station, and ongoing incidents of violence against women in rural areas have led to a surge in general discontent. She may have taken to the streets to demand justice for the RG Kar victims, but that did not dispel anti-incumbency sentiment among voters.

In regular courses, Trinamool Congress should be put in the dock for their performance as a government. Mamata Banerjee has been chief minister for 15 years. Anti-incumbency should be the main problem.Things have changed. Instead of being a challenger, bjp After a nationwide suppression of ghuspaithiyas, he became an oppressor. Guspetiya is a Bengali-speaking illegal immigrant, presumed to be an infiltrator from Bangladesh. The arrests and even the deportation of some to Bangladesh, where they were trapped and harassed, angered Bengalis, whether they were Banerjee loyalists or turned to the BJP as the only option against its rule and abuse of power. tenamore Congress in everyday experience.Shockingly, Bengali is not a language and the Delhi Police’s search for a “Bengali” translator was seen as an attack on the cultural identity, pride and history of Bengalis. In the eyes of Bengalis, the BJP became a party to attacks on the Bengali notion of eating fish and meat on a day considered significant for Sanatan Dharma.The 2026 Bengal Assembly elections were not meant to be a regular election. It was intended as a once-and-for-all confrontation aimed at purifying the bloated number of ineligible voters identifiable as Bengali-speaking infiltrators from Bangladesh (but mainly Muslims) who were sheltered by the Trinamool Congress after it first went to the polls in 2011. The Election Commission issued the warning even as it launched a particularly intensive revision of Bihar’s electoral roll in 2011. In June 2025, Bangladesh will be next.The deep-rooted dissatisfaction among a large mixed electorate against CM Banerjee’s Muslim “appeasement” politics appears to have been obscured by the SIR ruling expungement process. Even her enthusiasm for temple construction – the Jagannath Dham at Digha, the backyard of the opposition BJP leader Suvendu Adhikari – or her enthusiasm for laying the foundation stone of the Mahakaal temple in Siliguri, seems to have disappeared from the public domain. SIR has become a personal issue for the vast majority of voters, those adversely affected and others upset by the process of “alternating” neighbours, friends, colleagues and acquaintances, as one in 10 has been removed or subject to EC adjudication.Instead, political discourse acquired a new classification of voters, labeled as “adjudicating”, and this classification became so sophisticated that the Supreme Court took the extraordinary step of invoking Article 142 of the Constitution, which empowers the Supreme Court to “pass such decrees or orders as may be necessary to effect complete justice in any pending case or matter” because in the post-SIR Bengal elections, 34.45 lakh people were deprived of the fundamental right to exercise their right to choose through voting. The Electoral Commission’s decision to freeze the electoral roll without holding a hearing has been overturned – Banerjee immediately hailed this as “a victory for her” on behalf of the people.The BJP’s blind defense of the SIR exercise as a necessary intensification and customization process to verify the citizenship status of all voters, Gurspathians and eligible citizens has left its core constituency stranded in multiple constituencies, totaling more than 70 constituencies, including Matuas, a Scheduled Caste community that fled in large numbers after 1971. As Union Home Minister Amit Shah declared in Parliament, the purpose of SIR is to “detect, delete, deport”.SIR appears to have replaced anti-incumbency as the main issue in this election. The reason is simple: the effect of SIR was that 9.1 million voters were either deleted or put on trial, less than 12%; the number of voters fell from 7.08 billion to 6.44 billion. The election turned into a confrontation between the Trinamool Congress and the Election Commission on the one hand, and the Trinamool Congress and the Bharatiya Janata Party on the other. As the only party that has consistently supported the SIR process and EC implementation, even after the Supreme Court invoked Article 142 for the purpose of “complete justice”, the EC and the BJP are interchangeable entities in the perception of a large number of voters.There is a discontent that can be summarized as anti-incumbency. There is also general satisfaction, especially among women, as Banerjee is seen as the one who caters to their needs through direct cash transfer schemes like Lakshmir Bhandar and Swasthya Sathi cashless healthcare services. This loyalty is not transactional; It cannot be bought off by the double cash transfers promised by the BJP under its renamed ‘Lakshmir Bhandar’ (Matri Shakti Bharosa scheme). The disproportionate removal of 5.7 million women from the electoral roll has weakened Banerjee’s most loyal vote bank, as more than 50% of women voted for her in previous elections. This may trigger a shift away from her to the BJP as an alternative.The difference between 2021 and now is that the Trinamool is no longer hemorrhaging as much as it was then; the wave of defections to the BJP in 2021 has ended. There have been reverse flows from the BJP to the Trinamool over the past five years, most recently and most importantly from Adhikari’s close aide Pabitra Kar, who is also the Trinamool candidate from Nandigram.Rather than being a challenger offering better alternatives, the BJP, with its twin-engine model and “zero tolerance for Gurspathians” campaign, became a party designed to serve Bengal, prioritizing rounding up infiltrators from Bangladesh (most of whom are estimated to be Muslims) and deporting them. As the campaign progressed, the home minister made it clear that all ineligible voters removed by the tribunal set up under a Supreme Court order would be deported once the elections were over.When state elections are set against the backdrop of the legacy of major changes in India’s periphery, rather than a direct competition between competing parties for better governance, politics becomes a competition that has the most emotional resonance. The question is, has the BJP been able to frame the Trinamool as the last and worst perpetrator of the legalization of large-scale Bangladeshi illegal immigration, or has the Trinamool already framed the BJP as “anti-Bengali”? The new variable in the electoral battle is the homegrown Indian Secular Front, which won a seat in 2021. The party is currently contesting in over 30 seats and hopes to slash Muslim and Dalit votes, only at the expense of the Trinamool.The main rivals, the Trinamool Congress and the Bharatiya Janata Party, position themselves as defenders of Bangladesh’s statehood. In the BJP’s version, the Bengali nation needs to be purged of Muslims from Bangladesh who have been illegally granted asylum and pose a threat to the Hindu majority. In Trinamool’s version, the idea of ​​Bengal/India was shaped by generations of Bengali nationalist leaders who contributed to the narrative and politics of the freedom struggle and needed to be defended against distortions and mutations that undermined its essence as a secular, inclusive and guardian of an imaginary space in which the “streams of humanity” ultimately merged into the ocean of great humanity.The Trinamool Congress’s slogan for the 2026 elections is an assertion of how “Bengali” has been victimized and how it has emerged victorious: “Jataoi koro hamla, abar jitbe Bangla (No matter how many attacks there are, Bengal will win)” is the war cry. By positioning herself as a champion of Bengali identity, which includes its cultural pride in diversity and inclusivity, Banerjee hopes to turn sentiments in her favour, burying the growing and entirely legitimate dissatisfaction with her local leadership at the grassroots in both urban and rural areas.