The 2026 West Bengal assembly election explained

West Bengal voted for its eighteenth legislative assembly in two phases, on 23 and 29 April, with Mamata Banerjee seeking a fourth consecutive term. The Bharatiya Janata Party has considered the state its top target for the past decade. But, despite Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s best efforts, it has so far failed to dislodge the formidable party machine controlled by Mamata’s All India Trinamool Congress. While it has drastically expanded its presence in the state, building on almost a century of work by the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh and the Hindu Mahasabha, it has been the levers of the union government, and Modi’s ability to shape political discourse, that have propelled the party to become the principal opposition and, if the exit polls are to be believed, potentially form the next state government.

Since Modi came to power at the centre, agencies overseen by the union home ministry have opened a series of investigations into AITC leaders, ostensibly in an effort to get them to defect. The most notable of these were Mukul Roy and Suvendu Adhikari, both of whom had run Mamata’s party machine before being embroiled in corruption scandals and defecting to the BJP. Suvendu has been the leader of the opposition in the state assembly since 2021, when he defeated Mamata in a direct contest for the Nandigram seat. Nandigram was where their prominent role in the protests against land acquisition, in 2007, had laid the groundwork for ending more than three decades of Left Front rule in the state. The AITC machine is now largely under the control of Mamata’s nephew Abhishek Banerjee, who has also been the target of several investigations by central agencies.

The governor’s office has often found itself the locus of opposition to the state government, acting as a BJP mouthpiece and obstructing parts of the Mamata government’s agenda. Shortly before the 2026 election, the Modi government appointed to the post RN Ravi, a former intelligence officer who performed a similar role in Tamil Nadu for the past five years. There have also been legal battles over the release of over a trillion rupees in central funds to West Bengal, which is facing a debt crisis. The Citizenship (Amendment) Act, 2019 was, in large part, an appeal to the state’s large population of Hindu immigrants from Bangladesh, offering them a path to citizenship denied to their Muslim counterparts. The CAA, and the associated National Register of Citizens, have been part of a moral panic over alleged “infiltrators” from Bangladesh that the BJP has employed throughout the country in recent years. This helps activate an Islamophobic strain that has existed among West Bengal’s Hindus since before Partition, when they were a minority in the undivided Bengal province.

The Election Commission of India’s Special Intensive Revision, which dominated the campaign discourse this year, feeds into this moral panic, since it asks all would-be voters to prove their citizenship. When the SIR was first conducted in Bihar, shortly before the 2025 assembly election there, my colleague Sagar wrote that the process—whose implementation, under an unrealistic deadline, was shoddy—set a dangerous precedent for the country, since “the ECI appears to have taken on the onus of carrying out a de facto NRC without any sort of legislation or even an executive order.” West Bengal, which, unlike Bihar, does not have a state government aligned to the BJP, was expected to be the major flashpoint for the SIR, since the exercise would be carried out by state government employees working under an ECI that has increasingly attracted the reputation of being a proxy for the Modi government. Several booth-level officers died by suicide.