If you watched the drama that unfolded after Mamata Banerjee’s recent speech at Oxford University’s Kellogg College, you cannot be faulted for thinking that the BJP’s 2026 West Bengal election campaign reached the United Kingdom. Thanks to the event headlined by Banerjee – who had once expressed a desire to turn Kolkata into London – Kellogg College got a taste of Kolkata street politics.
The West Bengal chief minister was speaking on ‘Social Development – Girl, Child and Women Empowerment in West Bengal’, when members of the audience interrupted her speech. They started asking her pointed questions on the investment proposals worth “lakhs of crores” that she said had come Bengal’s way, and about the RG Kar rape and murder case that rocked West Bengal last year.
But when a protester asked, “Mamata ji, anyone for Hindus?”, Bengal watchers were reminded of the BJP’s core campaign strategy for the 2026 assembly elections—Hindu angst against minority appeasement.
Banerjee’s response – “I am for all – Hindus, Muslims, Sikhs, and Christians” – could neither placate the heckler nor her detractors back home. Would it, then, convince the secular Bengali to stand by her?
One election, one issue
The state’s principal Opposition party has trained its guns on Mamata Banerjee, focusing exclusively on her government’s alleged Muslim appeasement. Sharing a video of an injured man on X, Leader of the Opposition in the West Bengal Legislative Assembly, Suvendu Adhikari, wrote: “The Jihadis are out of control and are plundering, bashing and vandalising in an unabated manner. Their targets are Hindus, whoever it may be. Look at the condition of the driver of a goods vehicle carrying cottage cheese. He was bashed up brutally for no fault of his own.”
This is not the first time Adhikari has unabashedly attacked Banerjee for appeasing minorities and ignoring the plight of Hindus. He and other senior BJP leaders have been bringing it up since the RG Kar protests thinned out, and targeted attacks on minority Hindus in Bangladesh made international headlines.
On 25 December 2024, Union minister and BJP state president Sukanta Majumdar accused the Trinamool Congress of turning West Bengal into “a safe haven for jihadi elements from the neighbouring country”, after the arrest of Ansar-al Islam Bangladesh activists in the state.
Meanwhile, Adhikari had said that jihadi activists were being “aided by the ruling party in West Bengal to have their own shelter”, and that the police and district administration were “silent spectators”.
Challenging the Mamata Banerjee government on 18 March this year, Adhikari said: “In Hindustan, Hindus will reign and in Bengal, those who will work for the welfare of Hindus will stay in power…Mamata Banerjee will again be defeated in Bhawanipore in 2026 by a BJP candidate.”
Former Bengal BJP chief Dilip Ghosh had similar things to say when I interviewed him for my book, Bengal 2021: An Election Diary, in 2020. He had told me confidently that Mamata Banerjee had no chance of winning. The people of Bengal, he said, were fed up of large-scale corruption, syndicate raj, mishandling of Cyclone Amphan relief funds, the pathetic condition of healthcare services during Covid-19, and minority appeasement. Banerjee, though, went on to win the election. This time, the BJP is focusing solely on the Hindu-Muslim divide to win.
In an article titled The Rise and Rise of Competitive Communalism in West Bengal, Joydeep Sarkar wrote: “In a no-holds-barred battle between the Trinamool Congress and the BJP, religious identity is being weaponised to consolidate vote banks, fundamentally altering the state’s political narrative as the 2026 Assembly elections draw near.”
Gone are the days when class struggle or development policies dominated discussions, wrote Sarkar. Now, Hindu majoritarianism and minority appeasement are the twin engines driving political discourse.
Aroon Shah, state vice president of the Bharatiya Janata Yuva Morcha, BJP’s youth wing, told me that the Hindu-Muslim voter ratio in the state roughly stands at 70:30. Such a consolidation will go in favour of the BJP, he stressed. “Since 2019, the BJP has gained more than 39 per cent votes in the Lok Sabha and Vidhan Sabha elections. These voters include people from all walks of life, including those who identify as secular,” Shah said. The million-taka question is: Will the secular Bhadralok play ball?
Also read: Heckling Mamata Banerjee in Oxford guarantees her a hero’s welcome in Kolkata
Bangladesh & Bengali exceptionalism
Political sociologist Suchismita Das told me the ‘secular Bengali’ may surprise poll analysts and vote for the BJP in 2026. “That is because the Bengali is as Islamophobic as anyone else. She just pretends to be otherwise. The events that unfolded in Bangladesh after the fall of Hasina have changed the game in Bengal.”
Das said that earlier, when the BJP criticised Banerjee’s minority appeasement or pointed at communal flare-ups in Bengal’s hinterland, it would only speak to a limited number of voters. But the situation in Bangladesh has helped spread Islamophobia even within the “so-called secular Bhadraloks”.
The Bhadralok, though, is hard to decipher, and so is Bengali exceptionalism. In the 2021 assembly elections, many vocal critics of Mamata Banerjee voted for her just to keep the BJP out of power. Many of the genuine reasons that Dilip Ghosh had told me did not get converted into enough votes against Banerjee. What worked for her was the binary she established between the Bengali and the Bohiragoto (outsider). The BJP mounted an effective campaign but could not crack the curious concoction of Bengali pride and intellectual cosmopolitanism.
Will a singular focus on Hindu religious identity help the BJP this time around?
Popular Bengali actor Anindya Chatterjee told me that it is very difficult for Hindus outside Bengal to understand how even a god-fearing Bengali Hindu can gorge on a plate of mutton biriyani after pandal hopping on Durga puja, or celebrate Christmas with the same zeal as Saraswati puja. For Chatterjee, this sense of Bengali exceptionalism is not just limited to the Bhadralok class, and has entered much of Bengal’s bloodstream. “This does not make Bengali Hindus lesser Hindus but uniquely Hindu,” he said.
The BJP has indeed made significant strides in Bengal’s political landscape. But has it managed to understand what makes the Bengali, Bengali? Perhaps the answer lies in the term “non-Bengali”, often used to other outsiders and perhaps a much more potent marker of identity in Bengal compared to religion.
As Sudeep Chakravarti wrote in his 2017 book The Bengalis: “It (the term non-Bengali) is closer to non-person than persona non grata, but that would be splitting hairs, which the Bengali can perform even when asleep.”
The goings-on in Bangladesh or the ruckus in Oxford may not be enough to change that.
Deep Halder is an author and a contributing editor at ThePrint. He tweets @deepscribble. Views are personal.
(Edited by Zoya Bhatti)