Voting will end in West Bengal next week. How will she vote this time? It is foolish to make predictions. We will know the answer on May 4. This column will attempt to set the current elections in the broader historical context of West Bengal politics.

The story of this election in West Bengal is dominated by two factors: the disproportionate deletion of voters in Muslim-dominated districts and assembly constituencies (ACs) and the unprecedented “sanitization” measures imposed by bringing in central forces, a massive reshuffle in the state bureaucracy and unheard-of security protocols, including restrictions like not riding a motorcycle. It is not the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), but the Election Commission of India (ECI) that is carrying out these actions.

Let us step aside for a moment from the debate around the alleged bias of the ECI, not to exonerate it, but to consider the historical fact that elections in West Bengal have long been a violent affair. The 1972 elections were perhaps the most controversial in the state. CPI(M) managed to win the 1977 elections as an opposition party under very difficult circumstances. TMC ousted CPI(M) amid large-scale electoral and non-electoral violence that began with the 2006 agitation against land acquisition in Singur and later Nandigram. Despite facing large-scale electoral violence, especially in the local body elections in 2018 and 2023, the BJP has grown as a strong political force in the state. It is politically incorrect to say this, but without the ability to confront political violence and carry out counter-violence, no political party can hope to gain a foothold in West Bengal, leave alone win. This has been the DNA of the state’s politics for more than half a century.

It is no coincidence that the main BJP leader in the state, Suvendu Adhikari, is Bengal’s Nelson of the Battle of Trafalgar. He led TMC to victory and dominance in the state after the Nandigram battle, where it completely defeated the CPI(M). However, the officers did not perish like the British Admiral and started demanding a share in power from Mamata Banerjee, which she was unwilling to give.

Needless to say, the party in power in the state will have an advantage on this front compared to the opposition. However, this distortion of West Bengal politics should not mislead one into thinking that political competition is only about power and there is no popular will or political attraction for violence. West Bengal is too big a state to wag the tail of the political dog of violence.

The rise of the communists in the state was an ideological victory backed by political violence, carried out mainly by radicals and poor farmers. What started as the Tebhaga movement – ​​literally meaning the farmer kept two-thirds of the produce for himself instead of sharing it equally with the landlord – was sanctified by securing tenancy rights under Operation Barga around independence when Jyoti Basu took over as chief minister of the state in 1977.

Once in power and fulfilling their key promise of land reforms, the Communists faced the unenviable task of creating a status quo within the framework of what the political scientist Dwaipayana Bhattacharya has called a party society in West Bengal. His book Government as Practice: Democratic Left in a Transforming India is a must read for those who want to understand the current politics of the state. Efforts to confront the communists after 1977 were almost invariably based on depoliticization and demobilization within the ranks. Critical left intellectuals like the late Ashok Mitra had highlighted this long before the CPI(M) started suffering electoral defeats in the state.

In fact the reason for the decline of the communists in the state was not ideological decline, but the Left government’s high-risk strategy of land acquisition to promote industrialization (and improve public welfare). The rains that occurred in Singur and Nandigram, unlike previous riots in the state, also eroded the perceived political legitimacy of the CPI(M) and dealt a blow that completely destroyed it as a political force.

To be fair to the Communists, the ideological dilemma that forced them to adopt the path of high-risk land acquisition – namely, the failure to bring about structural change in a state that was economically stable despite performing better in agriculture – is not easy to resolve. Even states that have done much better than West Bengal on this challenge realize that they have done little to generate gainful employment on a large scale.

Looking back, the now marginalized comrades in Alimuddin Street – the West Bengal CPI(M) headquarters, which once served as the state’s center of power – would be kicking themselves for not taking the pro bono route to manage political aspirations. This is what his rival Mamata Banerjee, or his Kerala comrade Pinarayi Vijayan, has done so well. Almost all the Chief Ministers of the country are now following the same script and there is good reason to believe that voters give more importance to the money coming into their bank accounts rather than the investment account of the state.

The question of major economic transformation in West Bengal and most of India has been solved politically by a backward action of palliative distribution rather than by the capitalist or communist vanguardism of accelerating private accumulation or abolishing private property. The material basis of Mamata Banerjee’s popularity is not much different from that of most Chief Ministers in the country today. All conspiracy theorists should appreciate this basic fact.

However, the palliative route to power is not the only political economy characteristic of West Bengal. What sets it apart from most of the big states in India is the institutional thuggery of how grassroots politics operates in West Bengal. While this great evil has persisted in the state despite the Communists losing power, the TMC has transformed it into an ideology agnostic, rather opportunistic enterprise, what Dwaipayana Bhattacharya termed the franchise politics model in a 2023 paper published in the Economic and Political Weekly. This involves a political behavior where local party bosses (read strongmen) preside over a fiefdom that is stuck in a ruthlessly rent-seeking but not necessarily religiously hostile economy in return for providing boots on the ground to the TMC. This dialectic works on the larger political arbitrariness of Mamata Banerjee’s provision of grants and, to a lesser extent, on the regional exceptionalism of the Bengali elite, who is portrayed as a staunchly non-Bengali national hegemon (read BJP).

The unprecedented security environment around the 2026 elections is clearly an all-out effort by the ECI to weaken TMC’s local franchise. While it may temporarily ban such elements, it would be a mistake to assume that TMC’s electoral support is completely rigged and there is nothing organic in it. Undoubtedly, the net impact in closely contested places could be significant as far as electoral results are concerned. However, the fact that TMC’s dominance in local body elections (many of these seats are won “unopposed”) is much greater than in Assembly or Lok Sabha elections – the former being much less monitored than the latter – suggests that the contest in state and national elections is in any case “fair”.

The last piece of the West Bengal political puzzle is the Muslim vote in the state. This is close to 30% of the state’s voters and is now overwhelmingly united behind the TMC. With Muslims losing their bipartisan character in state politics with the rise of the BJP, there has clearly been a major communal polarization in the state. A basic arithmetic around the headline vote share numbers shows that the BJP is indeed ahead of TMC among Hindu voters. In a state where Hindus constitute about 70% of the population, BJP has about 40% vote share versus 57% vote share among Hindus, if one assumes that Muslims do not vote for BJP. While the BJP may see this as a sign of imminent victory, it may also be seen as a sign of reaching a pinnacle in terms of political support. For example, in Gujarat, a state with almost 90% Hindu population, BJP’s vote share is around 50%, which suggests that it has around 55% vote share among Hindus.

The SIR exercise in West Bengal involved a unique decision part, which, unlike the normal SIR process, has led to disproportionately large deletions in Muslim-majority parts of the state, giving rise to opposition allegations of dividing voters in West Bengal in a pro-BJP manner. However, unless TMC faces a large-scale exodus of Hindu voters, as it faced in the 2019 elections, and then recovers with economic relief, it would be premature to assume that anything like this will happen this time.

TMC’s victory in West Bengal will be portrayed as a political ideological victory over the BJP and its alleged institutional excesses. If BJP wins, it will give credit to the Election Commission for conducting fair elections.

The actual political fault line in West Bengal, when viewed historically, is different and less amenable to convenient or reasonable political interpretations. This is a state that is using economic palliative measures to ease economic concerns, has moved from a doggedly empty party society to an ideologically bankrupt franchise politics model and is staring down a religious fault line that has perhaps never been deeper since independence. The first undermines long-term economic interests, the second gives politics a suffocating hold on society, especially its most vulnerable sections, and the third is a time bomb which, if burst, could cause unprecedented disruption and damage to the social fabric of one of India’s largest states.

The ongoing rhetoric between the TMC and the BJP in the state, which makes the elections a nice ideological contest between regional exceptionalism/pluralism versus good governance without acknowledging the fundamental problems troubling the state’s politics, is best described using a Bengali phrase, which this (non-Bengali) writer learned from Ashok Mitra’s comment about the CPI(M)’s failed ideological gymnastics in the Singur-Nandigram debate. Shaak di mach dhaka jaaye na (You can’t hide fish by adding spinach).

(Roshan Kishore, HT’s data and political economy editor, writes a weekly column on the state of the country’s economy and its political fallout, and vice versa)