Turning Raids into Electoral Gold

From the Singur protests to recent clashes with the ED Clashes, federal friction has fueled the TMC’s triumphs. In the lead-up to the 2026 West Bengal Assembly Elections, Akhilesh Sinha casts a spotlight on this unfolding political contest.

West Bengal's political theatre has once again erupted with the thunder of enforcement raids. Earlier this month, When the Enforcement Directorate (ED) descended on the home and office of Prateek Jain, chief of political strategy firm I-PAC, Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee did not just fume from afar. She stormed the scene, snatched documents from the officers' hands, and accused Union Home Minister Amit Shah of misusing probe agencies. Her charge that the Centre wants to pilfer her election playbook ahead of the state assembly polls. Time and again, such clashes with Delhi have burnished the Trinamool Congress (TMC), transforming federal friction into votes.

Mamata has long weaponized ED and CBI actions as Centre-orchestrated vendettas. Ahead of the 2021 assembly elections, following Prime Minister Narendra Modi's second term, tensions peaked over central agencies' incursions. Raids targeted coal smuggling, chit-fund scams, and the 2014 Narada sting operation exposing TMC leaders taking bribes. In the coal scam, names like Abhishek Banerjee, her nephew, and his wife surfaced. Searches hit Asansol, Kolkata, and beyond over illegal extraction from Eastern Coalfields Limited mines.

Victimhood Narrative

In May 2021, the CBI arrested TMC Ministers Firhad Hakim, Subrata Mukherjee, MLA Madan Mitra, and Sovan Chatterjee. Mamata spun these into a narrative of the BJP’s ‘revenge.’ Her alleged injury during a Nandigram visit, where she was pushed near her car and fell, became campaign fodder. Wheeling into rallies with plastered limbs, she outshone Modi’s aggression. The ‘Ma, Mati, Manush’ (Mother, Land, People) mantra resonated, netting the TMC 213 seats against the BJP’s 77. Anti-incumbency fizzled and Mamata positioned herself as Bengal's identity guardian, trumping regional fault lines as BJP fell short of 80 seats.

The longer view is equally telling. Since toppling the Left Front in 2011, Banerjee has steadily consolidated power. The TMC’s seat tally rose from 184 in 2011 to 211 in 2016, and remained above 200 in 2021. The BJP’s growth has been real but uneven, surging in national elections and retreating in state contests. Even in the 2024 general election, when Modi secured a third term nationally, Bengal leaned back towards its Chief Minister: the TMC lifted its Lok Sabha tally to 29 of 42 seats, while the BJP slid to 12.

On December 11, 2019, the Central government tabled the Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA), which Mamata branded anti-minority. She alleged fund freezes for MGNREGA, PMAY schemes, turning probes into her arsenal.

Political Grammar

Identity, more than ideology, explains the pattern. Banerjee’s political grammar rests on the flexible triad of ‘Ma, Mati, Manush’ which was first forged during the Singur and Nandigram agitations of 2006–07 against land acquisition under the Left Front, the slogan fused agrarian grievance with cultural pride. Police firing in Nandigram, which killed 14 villagers, cemented her image as a street-fighter for Bengali dignity. The Left never recovered.

Banerjee’s party felled the Left in 2009-11 polls, with her ‘farmer-friendly’ image sealing a landslide win for the TMC. Since the ascent of PM Modi and the BJP in 2014, any probe by the central agencies or any fund cuts has been framed By Banerjee as an assault on Bengal’s ethos. In this narrative, the anti-minority BJP becomes the ‘outsider’ while West Bengal’s minorities and the depressed classed consolidate behind her.

Policy disputes have been routinely recast as existential threats. The Citizenship Amendment Act, passed in December 2019, was portrayed as an assault on minorities; alleged delays or freezes in central welfare funds as collective punishment. The line between governance and grievance has been deliberately blurred by Banerjee.

The latest ED raid fits neatly into this pattern. By turning up unannounced and accusing Delhi of plotting to ‘steal’ her election playbook, Banerjee reasserted her preferred battleground of the street. She well understands that in Bengal, sympathy is often mobilised more effectively than outrage.

Still, the strategy is not without risk. While raids have repeatedly minted sympathy votes, they also keep allegations of corruption alive in the public mind. Bengal’s economy remains fragile, industrial investment thin, and governance uneven. Over time, fatigue with permanent confrontation may set in, especially among urban voters who once flirted with the BJP as an alternative.

The question is with barely a few months left for the Assembly polls, will this familiar narrative deliver the goods for the TMC? 

The Bhadralok Question

The Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) has played a canny move by appointing the youthful Nitin Navin as its national executive president ahead of upcoming West Bengal election. His roots in the Kayastha community give him outsized significance. Even without the support of the ‘Bhadralok’ - the genteel upper crust on which Mamata Banerjee’s power rests - the BJP has already carved out a strong presence in Bengal. By elevating the Kayastha leadership, the party has executed a shrewd move to peel this influential class away from the Trinamool Congress (TMC).

Post-independence, West Bengal’s politics has been disproportionately shaped by a narrow social stratum: the bhadralok. Drawn largely from upper-caste groups - Brahmins, Kayasthas and Vaids - this educated, urban elite dominated the state’s institutions long after universal suffrage arrived. Through their grip over schools, universities, the bureaucracy and the professions, they underwrote successive regimes, from the Congress to the Left Front, and later the Trinamool Congress (TMC).

Key Position

Within this universe, Kayasthas occupied a pivotal position. Numerically small but institutionally entrenched, they supplied administrators, writers, scientists and political leaders in abundance. Their presence cut across party lines, leaving an imprint on nearly every governing formation the state has known. Yet over time, this dominance was eroded by a slower reshuffling of social power as backward castes and rural groups asserted themselves electorally.

The bhadralok itself did not disappear; it mutated. Many who once prided themselves on intellectual distinction and public virtue drifted into a more comfortable, consumption-oriented middle class. Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee, the Marxist chief minister who presided over the Left’s last years in power, captured this unease with characteristic acerbity. Living standards, he observed, had risen; the cultural pride that once animated Bengali public life had not.

Despite constituting barely a fifth of the population, the bhadralok’s political influence has remained stubbornly resilient. Kayasthas, in particular, have been omnipresent before and after independence, shaping administration, policy and ideology. Congress stalwart Prafulla Chandra Sen, chief minister between 1962 and 1967, prioritised rural development well before land reform became fashionable. Under the Left, Jyoti Basu, another Kayastha, converted ideological ambition into administrative endurance. His 23-year tenure, the longest of any chief minister in India, rested not only on peasant support generated by Operation Barga and decentralised panchayats, but also on quiet backing from bureaucrats and intellectuals, many of them from the same social milieu.

Culturally, the bhadralok’s self-image was immortalised long before it was politically challenged. Rabindranath Tagore’s Nastanirh, later adapted by Satyajit Ray as Charulata, offered an intimate portrait of a prosperous, inward-looking elite—refined, anxious and morally self-aware. It was this class that fuelled the Bengal Renaissance, drawing inspiration from the Brahmo Samaj and from European modernity. That inheritance still shadows Bengal’s elections.

The rise of rural politics in West Bengal was neither an anti-Brahmin uprising nor a Dalit revolt against upper-caste dominance. Instead, post-Partition Bengal produced a paradox: an elite that clung to cultural authority even as its material and political primacy waned. Many analysts trace the inflection point to the 2018 panchayat elections, when local strongmen and minor players outmanoeuvred established parties, signalling a shift from ideological mobilisation to raw organisational muscle.

Caste and community, often underplayed in Bengal’s self-conception, have always mattered. The bhadralok retained its hold over literature, academia and science even as religion and newer social coalitions chipped away at its electoral supremacy. Kayasthas, though weakened, remained politically relevant because their socio-economic position allowed adaptation rather than extinction.

The Trinamool Congress still reflects this continuity. Figures such as Sougata Roy, a senior MP from Dum Dum, exemplify the enduring Kayastha presence within Mamata Banerjee’s party. Yet the grip has loosened. By elevating Nitin Nabin to a prominent organisational role, the BJP has signalled an intent to prise open the bhadralok vote bank.

Whether this social recalibration will unsettle Banerjee remains uncertain. Bengal’s elite has survived many political transitions by adjusting its loyalties. But as identity, aspiration and organisation reshape the electorate, even the state’s most durable class may find its influence increasingly contested.

Endgame CPI (M): From Reform to Ruin

For more than three decades, West Bengal was the world’s most enduring communist experiment conducted through the ballot box. From 1977 to 2011, the Communist Party of India (Marxist) governed without interruption, reshaping the countryside, taming labour militancy and building a formidable organisational machine. Today it holds not a single seat in the state assembly. No other major Indian party has fallen so far, so fast, or so completely.

The proximate cause of this collapse is well known. Singur - the 2006 decision to acquire farmland for a Tata Motors factory - has become shorthand for the moment the Left lost its moral compass. Yet the debacle was the culmination of a long, uneven unravelling in which early successes curdled into ideological rigidity and political blindness.

Under Jyoti Basu, who ruled from 1977 to 2000, the Left Front engineered one of India’s most ambitious programmes of agrarian reform. Land-ceiling laws and Operation Barga redistributed roughly 10 lakh acres to 28 lakh beneficiaries, over half of them Dalits and Adivasis. Sharecroppers gained legal protection over another 11 lakh acres. Agricultural growth surged from a torpid 0.6 percent to around 7 percent, rural incomes rose and the party built a loyal peasant base that sustained it for decades.

Hidden Costs

But these achievements carried a hidden cost. As India liberalised in the 1990s, Bengal’s rulers remained wary of industry and private capital. Manufacturing stagnated, investment migrated elsewhere and the state’s once-proud industrial belt rusted. When Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee, Basu’s successor, belatedly attempted to reverse course, he did so clumsily. The land acquisitions at Singur and Nandigram in 2006–07 pushed through with bureaucratic zeal and enforced by police batons shattered the Left’s compact with the countryside. In Nandigram, police firing killed 14 villagers.

Electorally, the damage unfolded in stages. In 2006 the CPI(M) still won 176 assembly seats, installing Mr Bhattacharjee as chief minister. But Singur handed Mamata Banerjee and her Trinamool Congress (TMC) the rallying cry they had long lacked. By 2011, after 34 years in office, the Left was ousted. Even then, it retained around 30 percent of the vote and 40 seats. In 2016, fighting alongside the Congress, the Left’s vote share slid below 20 percent, with just 26 seats. In 2021 it fell to zero.

Organisational decay compounded ideological error. The CPI(M)’s famed party machinery, once embedded deep in rural Bengal through unions, peasant fronts and local clubs, aged badly. Leadership renewal stalled; women and younger voters drifted away. The party became increasingly confined to pockets of Kolkata and a handful of university campuses, while its once-feared cadre system atrophied.

Meanwhile, Mamata Banerjee reframed the state’s political identity around Ma, Mati, Manush, appropriating much of the Left’s old social vocabulary while discarding its doctrinal baggage. Muslims and the poor consolidated behind the TMC; Hindu voters, especially in urban and border districts, gravitated towards the BJP. Squeezed between these forces, the Left struggled to define its enemy.

In 2021 the CPI(M) stitched together an improbable alliance with the Congress and the Indian Secular Front, a fledgling outfit with roots in conservative Muslim politics. The experiment backfired. The Left’s vote share collapsed to 4.7 percent; the Congress and ISF fared even worse. The alliance alienated middle-class voters without mobilising new ones, confirming the perception of a party unsure of its own identity.

Elsewhere, the CPI(M) has chosen to husband its dwindling resources. Kerala, where it still governs, has become the centre of gravity. Bengal, once its ideological heartland, is now peripheral. No Lok Sabha seats in 2024 underlined the scale of the eclipse.

Singur may have triggered the fall, but it did not make it inevitable. What sealed the CPI(M)’s fate was its failure to rethink strategy or speak convincingly to a society it had helped transform.

Congress’ Bengal Fadeout

The Congress’s ouster from West Bengal's power corridors in 1977 finds no reversal in sight. Dreaming of a national comeback, the party has virtually vanished in the state.

Once a dominant force, Congress has plummeted across 10 successive elections, now teetering on zero. Despite allying with the Left in 2021 assembly polls, it won no seats; in 2024 Lok Sabha elections, it clinched just one out of 42, with vote share at 4.7 percent as Adhir Ranjan Chowdhury lost Baharampur From 44 seats in 2016, its best in four elections, it crashed to zero in 2021, signalling near erasure alongside Left rivals.

Subhankar Sarkar

One moment the state unit flirts with the logic of the I.N.D.I.A. opposition bloc, hinting at cooperation with Mamata Banerjee. The next, it contests against her party, only to retreat again. The effect has been corrosive. Workers on the ground struggle to explain whom they are meant to be fighting and why. In September 2024, Shubhankar Sarkar replaced Chowdhury, TMC's fiercest critic, as state president. Lacking mass appeal or electoral wins despite long party service, Sarkar favoured an alliance with the TMC, unlike his predecessor.

Under his stewardship, the Congress has increasingly defined itself by what it opposes nationally rather than locally. Protests have focused on visits by senior BJP leaders, including a recent demonstration against Amit Shah’s trip to the state. Delegations have petitioned the governor over alleged discrimination against Bengalis in BJP-ruled states. These are not trivial issues. But they leave the TMC largely unchallenged. Criticism of state-level governance has been sporadic, almost apologetic.

Contrast this with BJP, the main opposition post-2021. Emboldened by its triumphs in Delhi and Bihar, the BJP has ramped up booth-to-district groundwork, dispatching leaders to challenge Mamata Banerjee systematically.

Siddhartha Shankar Ray was Congress’ last Chief Minister (1972- 1977). The Left’s rise under Jyoti Basu eroded the Congress’ base. Mamata Banerjee, then in the Congress, quit the party in 1997, founding the TMC on January 1, 1998. Her anti-Left faction split the Congress, and ousted the Left within 14 years. Post-power, Mamata decimated the Left while stifling a Congress revival, leaving it sidelined for 48 years in a TMC-BJP duopoly.