Bengal Election has Become a Battleground For Two Ideologies: Bengali Asmita vs Hindu Parichay
Bengal is quickly turning into a fierce political battleground. With assembly election dates announced, parties are banking on their ideological positionings. As the Trinamool Congress (TMC) is seeking a fourth term, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) – the main opposition party – has thrown its economic and political might in its attempt to form the government in Bengal.
TMC is well placed with a formidable election machinery at the booth level which BJP wants to weaken through communal polarisation, a phenomenon that has turned the 2026 Bengal election into a battle between the TMC’s ideology of Bengali Asmita (pride) vs BJP’s Hindu Parichay (identity). A clear cut clash ranges from the TMC’s invoking of Bengal’s cultural past and culinary traditions such as non-vegetarianism, especially the Bengali emotions connected with eating fish. On the other hand, the BJP, with its widespread celebrations of Ram Navami, fail to understand that Bengal stands as an exception to the masculinity ingrained in the religious practices in the Hindi heartland.
Bengal’s religious belief system is rooted more in its festivities rather than in primordial puritanism. In fact, the celebration of Maa Durga and Maa Kali shows the feminine side of religiosity practiced in Bengal unlike that of celebrating ‘’purushotto’’(supremacy of male) by BJP with positioning prime minister Narendra Modi as Vikash Purush, along with the Ram mandir Project and Jai Shri Ram Slogans that are quite alien to the progressive imaginations of Bengalis.
BJP’s ideological assault on TMC
Populist right wing slogans of ‘Ek hai to Safe Hai’, ‘Batenge toh Katenge’ often resonates in Bengal’s prominent BJP leaders' voices. The conscious attempts of ideological maneuvering by BJP in West Bengal is orchestrated to consolidate the Hindu vote bank as opposed to the Muslim vote bank of TMC. The BJP and it’s strong ideological arm, the RSS’s portrayal of Hinduism as a ‘strong alternative’ is launched in the poll bound state as a political project not limited to the election alone but as a social vision.
The TMC has no ideological alternative to counter the BJP-RSS’s ‘Hindu first agenda’. The former has only politically countered it by invoking sub-national Bengali identity while the latter has used it further to expose the ideological obliviousness of TMC. At the heart of this phenomenon is post partition Bengal’s deep seated anathema towards diverse social assertions – stemmed out of Poundra Kshatriya, Rajbanshi and Namashudra communities' anti caste icons – that is successfully articulated in Tamil Nadu by Iyothee Thass’s Tamil Buddhism and the Dravidian Periyaran ideology while in Kerala, it is reflected in Ayyankali’s Temple Entry movement and Narayana Guru’s SNDP movement.
Post-independence Bengal, a home for Indian nationalists, had socially and politically organised themselves as ruling elites, a factor that subsequently led to the emergence of the Bengali upper caste gentry who camouflaged as "bhadraloks" but quickly communalised their politics under the garb of Indian nationalism. Professor Joya Chatterji in her book ‘Bengal Divided’ has rightly called it out, "in less than forty years, bhadralok politics had come full circle, moving away from nationalist agendas to more parochial concerns."
From Womesh Chandra Bonnerjee to Shyama Prasad Mukherjee, the political shift has not been accidental but defined by ideological lineage, a legacy carried out well by Bengali bhadraloks. Their pursuit for political reform has consistently abandoned the social reform agenda. TMC’s ideological precarity amid BJP and RSS’s Hinduism, Hindutva and Ayodhya Ram Mandir juggernaut has been quite visible in the response of the Mamata Banerjee government's decision to build Jagannath Temple in the coastal town of Digha and later in laying the foundation stone of Durga Angan, a cultural complex dedicated to goddess Durga at the heart of Newtown Rajarhat area. The quick cultural moves of TMC has failed to counter the ideological assault of BJP in a time when right-wing pushes for the one.
TMC’s politics of Bengali pride against BJP’s resurrection of Hindu identity
As BJP has upped the tempo over the years for a militant ideological battle to end the TMC rule, the TMC on the other hand has slowly but steadily took refuge under the politics of Bengali Asmita. In the last Bengal assembly election, TMC’s political strategists had heavily banked on Mamata Banerjee’s Bengali woman identity, their campaign song for 2021 revolved around her,‘’Bangla Nijer Meyekei Chay' (Bengal wants its own daughter)’’. This year, the campaign song has been more aggressively invoking collective Bengali identity and its resilience to fight back, titled, ‘’Jotoi Koro Hamla, Abar Jitbe Bangla!’’(attack as much you can, Bengal will win again).
The BJP continues to counter TMC by branding it as "anti-Hindu", to unite Hindu votes in its favor. That is why, the RSS and it’s branch organisations are actively engaging with Dalits and Adivasis of rural Bengal. The historical peripheralisation faced by the Bengal’s marginalised castes due to the urban Kolkata-centred Bengali upper castes' exclusionary political discourse has opened up huge opportunities for the RSS to propagate the narratives of illegal infiltrations behind their social marginalisation.
The TMC’s decade long rule failed to dispel the right-wing Hindu Brahminical propaganda to appropriate distinct historical identities of Dalits and Adivasis of Bengal. The Hindu Parichay politics of BJP has clearly defeated the TMC’s resurrection of Bengali Asmita, at least socio culturally. The TMC, which is facing anti-incumbency due to its poor governance model and widespread institutionalised corruptions at all levels exposed by the massive education scam, is trying to overturn it by bringing in Bengali Asmita to the forefront of its political pitch in the 2026 election.
Yet, the TMC is fighting twin battles; Election Commission’s electoral activism and the right-wing’s Politics of Hindu Parichay. Needless to say, the 2026 election will be a litmus test for the battle between Bengali Asmita and Hindu Parichay.
Subhajit Naskar is a Political Scientist, teaches at Jadavpur University.
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