West Bengal Assembly Elections 2026 and the Footfalls of Fascism - A Balance Sheet

In this situation, it banked on seat delimitation. The proposal was to increase the seats in Parliament to 850, and reassign seats base on population growth, as per the 2011 Census, since no census data since then has been published. This punishes provinces that had seriously attempted to implement the earlier government policy of population control, while the Hindu-Hindi-Hindustan core base of the RSS, including Uttar Pradesh, Uttarakhand, Haryana, Bihar, Rajasthan have had its Hindu population pushed to large scale population growth under the RSS claim that otherwise Muslims will overtake the Hindu population soon and impose Islamic domination. Delimitation under such circumstances would have meant a significant and virtually permanent majority for the Hindi heartland provinces, which are industrially less productive, but which would then economically dominate the rest of India. However, delimitation involved a constitution amendment, so admitting it in Parliament required a supermajority (2/3rds or 352 votes). With the entire opposition lining up against the Bill, it failed. Capturing large states (West Bengal sends 42 MP to the Indian Lok Sabha, the directly elected Lower House) thereafter became vital.

The results:

The elections were held in two phases – 23 and 29 April, with counting carried out in 293 out of 294 seats on 4 May. We provide the details below:

2026 compared to 2021

Total: 294 Majority: 148

This however does not tell the bulk of the story. The elections this time involved a war by the federal state apparatus on an outlier province.

The story began with a change in the law about how the Election Commissioner of India was to be appointed. Under the new schema, the ruling party got a simple 2-1 majority, and the Chief Justice of India, previously a selector, was excluded. And the Supreme Court has been considering cases against the law for three years without any verdict, while a handpicked ECI acts on behalf of the ruling party. This was how Gyanesh Kumar was made the ECI.

As ECI he ordered a so-called Special Intensive Revision or SIR. The West Bengal case is particularly obnoxious, but in passing it is worth mentioning that the Chief Minister of Tamil Nadu, M. K. Stalin, a staunch opponent of Hindi imposition and of the RSS brahminism, lost by a few thousand votes in a seat where the SIR had deleted over a hundred thousand voters’ names. In West Bengal, the initial round excluded something like 54 lakh names. While a part are actually dead, duplicate names, moved to other place, etc, even here complaints were lodged about how actual voters’ names were deleted. Then came a revision. This was a horror show. It authorised handpicked personnel to supersede the legally designated officers responsible for voter verification. Rules changed without public notice. An ever-morphing software dictated terms to officers. WhatsApp messages and oral commands complemented written regulations. To understand why this SIR is fundamentally different, one must begin with a category that did not exist in Indian electoral practice before 2026: “Logical Discrepancy.”

The SIR required every voter to establish linkage to the 2002 electoral roll, either directly or through a relative. Voters were sorted into three groups: Mapped, Unmapped, and the newly introduced category: Logical Discrepancy.

On paper, this category captured mismatches in parental names, implausible age gaps, or inconsistencies in records. In practice, the triggers were often banal. Variations in transliteration, for example, “Mohammed” versus “Muhammad,” “Mondal” versus “Mandal”, routinely confused the ERONET software. Poor-quality scans of older rolls further undermined digital matching.

A voter could be flagged not because they were ineligible, but because software failed to recognise what any human reader would.

Midway through the process, the Commission introduced another layer: an algorithm that re-flagged voters who had already been successfully mapped. The goalposts shifted in real time, through software updates that were never publicly explained to voters or even consistently communicated to officials.

The SIR has been conducted thirteen times since 1952. Never before has a category like Logical Discrepancy been used to place millions of voters in a state of suspended franchise without a clear, public explanation of what the category means, how it is triggered, or how a voter exits it.

The target was clearly seats, and categories of voters, suspected of being pro-Trinamul.

The ECI did not stop with this. The SIR was uploaded in such a way that reading it was difficult. Alt News reported:

When Alt News attempted to work with the SIR Final Rolls 2026 for two Kolkata constituencies — Bhabanipur (159) and Ballygunge (161) — the obstacles began immediately.

The first barrier was access. Bhabanipur alone contains 267 zones. The ECI website allows downloads for only ten areas at a time, each gated by a CAPTCHA. Automation is effectively blocked. Manual downloading took hours.

The second barrier was the format. The scanned PDFs are, on average, 228 times larger than a digitally readable equivalent, yet contain none of the underlying structured data. This is not a technological limitation. India runs systems like Aadhaar, UPI, and DigiLocker at massive scale. Publishing a CSV (A computerised file with Comma Separated Values) alongside a PDF is trivial by comparison. The absence of such formats is a decision.

The third barrier lies within the files. Roughly one in ten voter entries carries a diagonal “UNDER ADJUDICATION” watermark, often obscuring the name itself. This is not incidental. It directly interferes with automated data extraction and even manual reading in some cases.

In the two constituencies combined Muslim voters account for 39.5%, but among under adjudication they came to over 66 %.

The ECI did not stop with the SIR. They issued a notice to the Trinamul congress, that sounded like a BJP threat. And they virtually made the state police non functional, bringing in huge amount of central police and para-military forces to conduct the elections. In summary, the ECI functioned like an arm of the state waging war on the people of Bengal.

Bt the SIR also gave positive bemefits to the BJP. On one hand Hindu communally minded voters were happy that this time the BJP meant business, and as a result voted more firmly for the BJP. In the other hand, there were about 27 lakh voters who objected and submitted documents. Add another 7 lakh or so from the original round of SIR. Not only did the ECI ignore them, but the Supreme Court, in the person of Justice Joymalya Bagchi, asserted that losing your vote in one election did not mean losing it for good. That a voter has the right to vote everytime seemed to have escaped Justice Bagchi. The supine behaviour of the Supreme Court emboldened the ECI. If we look at the total votes received across the province, the BJP got 29218815, while the AITC got 26002017. The difference is 3216798. If those 34 lakhs had the vote, with the BJP getting only a small share, an assumption that appears legitimate, then the margin could have been very different. The BJP majority could even have evaporated.

The BJP’s aims:

In the pre election bulletin of Radical Socialist, it had been said that The Assembly elections of 2026 have brought significant changes. From the foundation of the Trinamul Congress, the RSS has given it a considerable degree of support. Even in the 2021 Assembly elections, and the 2024 Parliamentary elections, there were fuzzy areas. Whether this means the much used and abused word “setting” can be discussed later. What is incontestable is, in 2026 the RSS, and the BJP at the central level, have been going all out to defeat the TMC. In the first place, the anti-incumbency sentiments are quite strong this time. Whether that would translate into votes against the TMC will have to be awaited, but after fifteen years, the lies, the frauds, are catching up. TMC supremo Mamata Banerjee has proclaimed about the millions of jobs she has created, while people remember her advice to sell chops in stalls, and the reality that jobs have been increasingly replaced by cash aid to the poor. We are not opposing cash aid. In fact, we believe that a Universal Basic Income for all would lower extremes of capitalist exploitation, giving working people a slight leverage. But when Rs 1000, or Rs 2500, under various heads per month replace salaries and wages, we are looking at an abysmal decline. When we look at government and other public data, at first glance West Bengal appears robust. The key industrial sectors, we are told, are tea, IT, petroleum, petrochemicals and leather. At least in three of these sectors, namely tea, IT and leather, the conditions of workers are very poor. In the IT sector, unionization remains difficult. In the tea gardens, the superexploitation of workers, including tying them down though the poor quality accommodations they are provided, means a highly exploited labour force that cannot easily walk away, contrary to myths of the free market. That a large employment sector like the jute industry does not figure among the leading sectors is also a telling instance of this being a case of jobless growth –profit for the capitalists but no trickle down at all for the workers.

So there is a growing dissatisfaction with the TMC. A part of the voters could actually transfer this dissatisfaction into the EVM. Not by tens of thousands of NOTA, but by voting opposition candidates. So this time the RSS could not treat the TMC as another, though less significant force it had nurtured in the past. If the RSS did not pull out all stops, the anti-incumbency votes are likely to go to the left. And whatever the current strength of the left, whatever the shortcomings of its Stalinist and Social Democratic politics, it remains the fundamental enemy for fascism. It does not want the left to get a single seat, or to gain a single percentage of vote. Accordingly, in 2025-26 it has become ever more aggressive against the TMC government, to show the disgruntled electorate that the alternative to the TMC must be the BJP.

The BJP saw that even losing small provinces could have serious consequences. And one of its goals is to impose a “One Nation One Election” policy. This calls for not only a parliamentary majority but 2/3rds of the state assemblies agreeing. Hence it has been using shady means – in Maharashtra, in Haryana, in Delhi, and now in West Bengal.

2011—2021-2026

In 2011, after 34 years, the Left Front was voted out as a result of mass movements over land acquisition in Singur, violence in Nandigram, etc. While the TMC was the beneficiary, it was not the force that had originally launched all the stirs. And it got votes not because masses of people wanted the TMC as much as they wanted the CPIM out.

By 2021, a decade later, the polish had worn off. What saved the TMC in 2021 was a public sentiment, supported and often organised by intellectuals and activists on the liberal and far left corners, summer up by the slogan #NoVoteToBJP . These were people who wanted to oppose the BJP but many of whom were also aggressively opposed to the CPIM, especially the ex-leftist liberals, but also certain currents of the far left. (For a detailed analysis of the 2021 results “2021 West Bengal Elections: Populist Right wins, Fascists Gain and the Left Disappears ”.) In 2021, the TMC/AITC won the highest number of seats. Ironic, because in 2006 the Left Front had won the highest number of seats. While the Left Front had looked at trade unions and some of their demands, and so on, while corruption under the Left Front, while very much in existence, had a limit, the period 2011 to 2026 saw corruptions galore coming into the open. Ponzi schemes, sting operations showing bribe taking, everything came into the open. Bribe taking for schoolteachers’ jobs led to a complicated lawsuit, ending with all who had been selected, regardless of whether bribe giving was proved, losing their jobs. No bureaucrat lost their jobs however, and certainly no minister. In 2024, a Junior Doctor was raped and murdered inside the hospital where she worked. Government protection meant only a minor figure was convicted. A mass movement broke out.

Corruption had become a way of life under the TMC/AITC. Left and liberal intellectuals living outside West Bengal consistently sang a song that the party of Mamata Banerjee was better than the CPIM, that the CPIM was a brutal, terror inspiring party, and Mamata Banerjee would resist the BJP. Nothing can be further from the truth. Mamata Banerjee in fighting the BJP reminded us of what her one time mentor, the late Subrata Mukherjee of the Congress, had said in 1974 in opposing the RSS—Jan Sangh (the JS was the forerunner of the BJP). He had said—we shall fight fascism with fascism. In 2021 already, she had developed soft Hindutva as her antidote to the RSS brand of Hindutva. To expect her to defend the secular fabric of the constitution is a joke of a very poor taste.

In short, there was a genuine anti-incumbency feeling in various levels. And her politics over the last five years did nothing to protect her. One of the myths peddled by advocates of “subaltern” theory for whom the TMC/AITC represents the subalterns, it is the upper castes who turned to the BJP. Keeping the SIR data in mind, we must still disagree. Women did not vote as massively for them as in 2021. In seats with high Dalit and Adivasi voters (SC and ST in legal language) the BJP won. In Muslim majority or large Muslim voter inclusive seats, only in Kolkata did the TMC/AITC hegemonise. Elsewhere that vote was split, with the Congress, the AISF, the Left, the AJUP getting chunks.

What I am arguing is, the Trinamul Congress was created in 1998 with cadre support from the RSS. It participated in Vajpayee’s government. This was a long term plan of the RSS, which can truly plan for decades. Now, having made the Left a marginal factor in electoral politics in west Bengal, the RSS wants to oust her and get their direct forces in. The election victory is a step in that direction. But the RSS would like the Trinamul Congress to survive, because for historic reasons, the Congress, the other main bourgeois party in the state, cannot compromise with the BJP/RSS, and the RSS still sees the left as its main enemy, as Modi’s post-election speech showed. He said that for the first time in half a century India has no communist government, and this indicates a change in the mindset of people.

Prospects for the Left:

There is a clear difference between contemporary fascism and its classical ancestors. It has generally not tried to abolish the forms of bourgeois democracy, even while it scrapes a thin layer of butter over more and more space. That means the left will be tormented, activists will be accused with false charges, kept arrested without even bail hearings, public meetings will be halted, but the parties will formally be allowed to exist. The radical left needs to clarify politics, but also to try to build organisational unity based on real agreements.

The elections saw the Left Front holding their votes compared to 2021. This means the theory that the Left is consciously pushing its supporters to vote the BJP does not reflect the truth. It is evident that some who had voted the left 15 or 20 years no longer do so. Even in 2011 when it lost, the left front had nearly 40% votes. Now it has just over 5%. But voters are not serfs. Mny moved to the BJP because when the Trinamul attacked left cadres the leaders failed to stand and fight, if necessary physically. Others had come in to a left entrenched in power for loves and fishes, and hen the perks disappeared so did they.

For the first phase of the election campaign the CPIM leaders carried on their routine unless the TMC is defeated the BJP cannot be tackled type o rhetoric. Around mid-March, however, reports from the ground made them realise that the tide was flowing so sharply against the TMC they need not bother. But the tide was going to the BJP. So thereafter they focused with a single mided intensity om the BJP. This should have been done for the past five years, along withactually resisting TMC crooked behaviour on the streets.

The left now faces difficult times. It must build its bases. And it has to do in a changed landscape. Large factories have been disappearing. Building mass organisations and movements means not just trade unions and peasant organisations, but serious sustained work among LGBTIQ+ groups, building serious ecological left movements, and so on. That will also enable the left to make meaningful contact with Dalits and advasis.

The RSS is still relatively weak in organisational terms in West Bengal. The Left must use what time it has to go to the people with its alternative ideology, values and build resistance. For the RSS-BJP attacking independent thinking is vital. There will be an assault on Jadavpur University in line with the earlier assaults on JNU. School level education will be under rapid Hinduization. The left has to look at these dimensions as well.

7 May 2026