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Bengal Burns: How Mamata Picked Up Her Enemy’s Weapon and Got Burnt

Sandip Chakraborty

The Assembly elections results in West Bengal are chilling. On the afternoon of May 4, as counting halls across the state processed ballot after ballot, a 15-year experiment in hatred-filled governance came to an end. The Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), the electoral vehicle of Hindu majoritarian nationalism, won 206 of the state’s 294 Assembly seats, reducing Mamata Banerjee’s Trinamool Congress (TMC) to 79 seats, a historic rout that analysts are calling one of the most consequential collapses in Indian state politics.

For those who have watched with alarm as BJP dismantles India’s federal, secular architecture state by state, the fall of Bengal is not merely an electoral outcome. It is a reckoning — and a deeply ironic one.

Before we indict BJP alone for this catastrophe, we must ask an uncomfortable question: who opened the door for it?

The Alliance That Should Never Have Been

In 1999, Mamata Banerjee joined the BJP-led National Democratic Alliance (NDA) government of Atal Bihari Vajpayee, becoming the Railways Minister, one of the most powerful portfolios in the Union cabinet. This was not a reluctant marriage of convenience. It was an enthusiastic embrace, and it achieved exactly what she needed: it drove out the Left Front from power in Bengal in 2011. But it also did something she never accounted for. It gave BJP its first serious foothold in Bengal’s political imagination. Banerjee told voters, workers, and organisers across the state that the BJP was a legitimate partner — a party you could work with, share power with, be photographed with.

That legitimacy, gifted by Didi (as Mamata Banerjee is popularly called) herself, became the foundation on which the BJP quietly built its Bengal machine over the following two decades.

The Soft Hindutva Trap

When BJP’s cultural offensive intensified after 2014, Banerjee’s response was not to stand firm on secular principles. It was to compete. She progressively increased financial assistance to Durga Puja committees over the years, from Rs 10,000 per committee in 2018 to Rs 85,000 per committee in 2024, benefiting over 43,000 organisers at a state expenditure of more than Rs 365 crore.

The TMC leader introduced a ‘Ganga Aarti’ along the Hooghly river, announced Rs 1,500 crore in infrastructure projects for the Hindu pilgrimage site of Gangasagar, and personally performed religious rituals — including Chokkhu Daan on Durga idols — which she broadcast on social media to reaffirm her Hindu identity.

TMC cadres even co-opted and amplified the Tribeni Kumbh — an event whose “700-year-old tradition” had been debunked as largely fabricated by Hindutva groups — legitimising what had begun as a Sangh Parivar (Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh) project.

The strategic logic seemed sound: neutralise the BJP’s Hindutva appeal by showing Bengal’s Hindus that Didi, too, worshipped their gods. The outcome was a political catastrophe. By playing on BJP’s turf, Banerjee did not neutralise the saffron agenda, she normalised it. She trained an entire electorate to evaluate their leaders through the lens of Hindu identity. And when the test came, voters chose the original over the imitation.

The Purge That Swung the Election

Rights activists and observers believe that the Special Intensive Revision (SIR) of electoral rolls disproportionately disenfranchised Muslims before the elections. The SIR removed around 9 million voters — nearly 12% of the electorate — with roughly 65% of those whose status remained undecided being Muslims. The BJP secured 2.88 crore votes compared with TMC’s 2.56 crore — a difference of just 32 lakh votes. Had the disenfranchised voters participated, the outcome could have been different.

The Supreme Court did not restore the voting rights of millions affected, but directed the Election Commission to publish a list of those impacted.

“Once the question of whether ‘I should be on the voter list’ became the dominant question for vulnerable populations, it’s not politics as usual,” said Neelanjan Sircar of the Centre for Policy Research, who travelled across Bengal before the polls. “The level of polarisation that the voter revision caused is something that people outside the state do not really grasp,” he added.

Paramilitary Forces and the ‘Theatre of Occupation’

The Narendra Modi government deployed 2,400 companies of paramilitary troops to West Bengal — a record for any provincial vote. The TMC and other Opposition parties argued that these forces were used to intimidate their workers rather than protect voters. When a Central government floods an Opposition-ruled state with its own security apparatus on the eve of a critical election, the line between election administration and federal coercion ceases to exist.

The BJP’s groundwork in Bengal was laid nearly a decade ago by the RSS and the Modi–Shah (Union Home Minister Amit Shah) leadership, who after experimenting with electoral roll revision in Bihar deployed it in Bengal as a decisive strategy. This was a well-thought-out game — patient, methodical, and ultimately devastating.

What Bengal Loses

As counting trends became clear, reports of arson and attacks on TMC offices emerged from Tollygunge, Baruipur, Kamarhati, Baranagar, Baharampur, Howrah, and Kasba. The BJP denied involvement. The fires were real.

Bengal is the land of Rabindranath Tagore, of Ram Mohan Roy, of a syncretic humanist tradition that spent centuries weaving Hindu and Muslim culture into something irreducibly its own. In Murshidabad, where Muslims constitute over 66% of the population, BJP has surged from two seats in 2021 to nine this time. A district that was once a fortress of pluralism is now a BJP territory.

Mamata Banerjee is not the sole villain of this story — the architects of institutional voter suppression, communal mobilisation, and paramilitary intimidation hold that distinction. But she is its tragic protagonist: an agent who picked up her enemy’s weapons, forgot her own, and lost everything. May 4, 2026 will be remembered as one of the most ill-fated days in India’s electoral history.

Bengal, the land of the Renaissance is now under new Hindu majoritarian management. And those who helped pave this road must now reckon with where it leads.

[Extract. Sandip Chakraborty is a Kolkata-based journalist who writes for NewsClick. Courtesy: Newsclick, an Indian news website founded by Prabir Purkayastha in 2009, who also serves as the Editor-in-Chief.]

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Bengal Was the First Breeding Ground of Hindu Nationalism and the Idea of Hindutva Originated There

Partha S. Ghosh

Historians have an inbuilt defence mechanism. Since they know that every history has history, they are surprise-proof. The West Bengal election results which have gone hugely in favour of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) may have upset many of them temporarily, but on reflection they have found themselves firmly footed. For them, Bengal has traditionally been an enigma, which has just once again been reconfirmed.

It was Bengal, from where the East India Company had started its Indian journey. The Mughals before them too had found the province interesting. Initially they encountered some difficulty to control it because of its wet cartography but in due course they took full advantage of the situation to build a prosperous rain-fed agricultural economy which helped them raise a massive standing army that was able to browbeat all contemporary Indian rulers. That the changing course of the Ganga in the previous hundred years came handy to them to take advantage of the situation is a long story.

During the hundred years of the East India Company rule (1757-1857) it was this province alone which was chosen for two important Hindu social reforms, one, the abolition of the Sati ritual, and two, the validation of widow remarriages. These reforms, however progressive, angered the Hindu conservatives, who had traditionally dominated the Bengali Hindu social order. This fact did not escape the notice of the politically suave British. They realised that since their business was business, they should scrupulously avoid interfering with the Hindu social norms.

Soon after the 1857 revolt when the British Crown supplanted the East India Company rule, their governing-bible was not to dirty their hands with the Hindu social practices however retrograde they were. They took the logic even further. Through systematic political manoeuvres, they sowed the seeds Hindu-Muslim discord which by the end of a few decades assumed monstrous proportions. It was no surprise that when Sir Syed Ahmed Khan was initiating a Muslim political and social awakening in the early twentieth century he identified the Bengali intelligentsia as his primary enemy.

It may be underlined that Bengal was the first breeding ground of Hindu nationalism. Even the idea of Hindutva originated there. It was not Vinayak Damodar Savarkar who had invented the word through his 1923 book Hindutva: Who is a Hindu? Which is commonly believed. The idea was developed by a Bengali, Chandranath Basu (1844-1919). He wrote a book in Bengali in 1892 called: Hindutva: Hindur Prakita Itihas (the true history of the Hindus). Even much prior to that, in 1858, another Bengali, Tarinicharan Chattopadhyay, had written Bharatbarsher Itihas (the history of India), which was out-and-out a Hindu chauvinistic-nationalistic statement spouting venom at everything Muslim.

From 1867, an annual event called Hindu Mela had been institutionalised in Bengal to which Bengali Bhadralok flocked in large numbers. The Bhadralok is a complicated concept which can be summarily understood as representative of the upper caste Bengalis consisting primarily of the Brahmins, Baidyas and the Kayasthas, the literati of Bengal in general. (One can entertainingly remember them as KABAB – KA for Kayastha, BA for Baman (Brahmin), and B for Boddi, or Baidya.) Started by Nabagopal Mitra, its initial financier was the Tagore family (six years after Rabindranath Tagore was born).

Over to Bengali Leftism now. Ironically the same Bengal which was the cradle of Hindu nationalism was also arguably the hotbed of India’s Left politics (though one must not forget the Telangana movement of 1946-51). During the second world war, particularly, after the Soviet Union joined the war on the Allied side, the Communist Party of India, which had a strong presence in Bengal, sowed the seeds of Leftism in Bengal. The Great Bengal Famine of 1943 boosted the movement which the then cultural troupes like the Indian People’s Theatre Association (IPTA) popularised further. Incidentally IPTA was established in the same year the famine had taken place. IPTA took its Leftist message to every middle-class Bengali home. The massive Partition refugee arrivals that overwhelmed Bengal, particularly Kolkata, advanced Leftism in general.

Since both the ruling Congress Party and the opposition Leftists were looking for the same political space in Bengal it had at least one positive effect. Though the Partition had ravaged the Bengal economy, this Congress-Left contestation ensured that there was no Hindu-Muslim communal violence though just in 1946 the province had witnessed The Great Calcutta Killings (a direct fallout of Mohammed Al Jinnah’s militant Direct Action Day call). It was a notable achievement given the fact that Bengal had a long history of Hindu-Muslim riots during the entire half a century prior to the Partition.

The next notable phase of Bengal politics was the rise of Naxalism in the late sixties and early seventies which was ruthlessly suppressed by the Congress Chief Minister Siddhartha Shankar Ray (1972-77), who incidentally is also credited for advising Indira Gandhi to declare her infamous Emergency in 1975. The Left Front rule in Bengal led by the Communist Party of India (Marxist) (CPI (M)) had a 34-year long innings from 1977 to 2011 to be replaced by the now defeated strongwoman Mamata Banerjee of the Trinamool Congress (TMC).

The question now is: Is Hindu nationalism which had started in Bengal in the second half of the nineteenth century coming full circle? Is the Bengali Bhadralok once again displaying his Hindu nationalistic fervour? If so, the inevitable question is will they lead the pan Indian Hindutva folk, or agree to be led by the Gujaratis, Marathis, or the Hindi-speaking north. Indian politics is at a critical juncture and the next ten years will be interesting to watch.

A much more interesting question, however, is if the Bengal BJP plays the same nasty communal game which the north Indian BJP has been playing at least ever since the Ram Janmabhoomi Movement of the early nineties, how it will end up. Not only that West Bengal has a 27% Muslim population, it is next to the Muslim-majority Bangladesh which has a 180-million strong population of which 8% are Hindus.

The Bengal BJP will tread carefully because India’s national security question is central to the whole issue. Mercifully, unlike in the past, India has appointed Dinesh Trivedi, a politician, not a career diplomat, as India’s High Commissioner to the country who should know the communal sensitivities better. Incidentally, though he is a Gujarati, he is from Bengal and speaks Bengali, which is his added political advantage.

[Partha Ghosh retired as professor at JNU. Courtesy: The India Cable – a premium newsletter from The Wire. The Wire is an Indian nonprofit news and opinion website. It was founded in 2015 by Siddharth Varadarajan, Sidharth Bhatia and M. K. Venu.]