Shikha Mukerjee | Modi Plays Safe In Rhetoric For Polls; Didi On Warpath

The recalibration of Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s rhetoric is intriguing; in Bihar, where he went first, and then in West Bengal on the second leg of his government-politics tour on July 18, though he promised thunder and brimstone, he delivered tame homilies. There was none of the “Ek Hain to Safe Hain” Hindu majoritarian battle cries heard in the Jharkhand election, which the BJP lost.

In contrast, on July 21, three days after Mr Modi’s visit, West Bengal chief minister Mamata Banerjee was in total attack mode issuing full-throated calls to all Bengali speakers to rally to the defence of the mother tongue. Launching the election campaign, Ms Banerjee announced a new “Bhasha Andolan”, or language movement. This Bhasha Andolan is against the terrorising of Bengali speakers by the police and governments in BJP-ruled states. It’s also a tactically smart response to Mr Modi’s appointing himself the guarantor of “Bengali Asmita”, or Bengali pride.

The war over who leads West Bengal, or who truly represents the state, has begun. Ms Banerjee declared herself as the leader of a crusade to defend Bengali culture and language. The Bhasha Andolan is a concept that includes the issues of illegal immigrants, Rohingya infiltrators, citizenship and a fightback against the politics of using language as a marker of illegality, as Assam CM Himanta Biswa Sarma has announced. It’s also a fightback over the fundamental freedom of movement guaranteed by the Constitution.

Mamata Banerjee hit all the right notes as the outraged icon of West Bengal politics; in contrast, Mr Modi’s first steps in the 2026 Assembly race were unexpected blanks or gaps in the message he delivered. In Bihar and West Bengal, two politically crucial states for the BJP, what he did not say is more significant than the speeches he delivered. For starters, Mr Modi walked on egg shells. The new 2025 edition of Mr Modi who visited West Bengal’s Durgapur and Bihar’s Motihari kept himself safely behind guard-rails erected by the compulsions of political calculations.

He did not defend the controversial Election Commission’s Special Intensive Revision of electoral rolls in Bihar; he simply reiterated that all aliens or non-citizens would be weeded out. He warned that electoral rolls in states that had a reputation for issuing fake documents to legitimise non-citizens would now be clean.

Mr Modi’s revised campaign spiel in West Bengal was a muted version of his past performances. He was cautious. He did not repeat his worst political blunder of cat-calling her “Didi, O Didi”. He did not accuse Ms Banerjee of appeasement politics. Even more significant was his careful avoidance of the issue of migration and deportation of Bengali speakers from across the country.

Given that Ms Banerjee had walked, rain drenched, 48 hours before he hit West Bengal, to protest against the illegal deportation of Bengali migrant workers, Mr Modi’s silence on the subject was deafening.

Why was Mr Modi so wary? For sure, he and the BJP can argue that the SIR is sub-judice and, therefore, off-limits for the Prime Minister. There is another reason why Mr Modi needed to be careful about what he said. Was he toeing the line drawn by alliance dharma? The Telugu Desam Party, his second largest pillar of support in the Lok Sabha, where the BJP is a minority government, has made it clear that the SIR is not for verifying citizenship. That does put the Modi government and the EC on notice; there are lines that should not be blurred.

Deporting Indian citizens or rounding up Bengali speakers on the assumption that they are likely to be illegal Bangladeshis masquerading as migrants, is an issue that Mr Modi ought to have addressed. As PM, he does have responsibility for the wrongful confinement of Indian citizens incorrectly suspected to be illegal immigrants or aliens. And, as Prime Minister, he ought to express an opinion on out-migration from worse-off states. Avoiding the subject is as good as denial of responsibility and the failure to think up a solution to mistaken identification of peripatetic citizens compelled by economic circumstances.

The problem of making promises, that is Mr Modi’s “guarantees”, is they have a tendency of reappearing on report cards. However hard Mr Modi may try and convince voters that his Gujarat model development vision has succeeded, there will be a reality check. In Bihar, the Nitish Kumar-NDA has been around, both on and off, since 2005. As Prime Minister, Mr Modi has been around since 2014. Over these years, Motihari, as Mr Modi promised, hasn’t moved in the direction of becoming Mumbai; instead, migrants from Bihar have moved out of the state in search of opportunities, jobs, education and a better quality of life.

Why Mr Modi or the BJP believe that development dreams are likely to convince disgruntled voters as convincing scenarios for what matters most, jobs and money, is a mystery. Next door in West Bengal, why voters in the not-so-run-down industrial city of Durgapur will believe Mr Modi’s spiel that the Rs 5,400 crores spend he unveiled before the public rally will change the fortunes of a place that has seen it all is another mystery.

The gap between what Mr Modi thinks he has done and the lived reality of people in places where he delivers his by-now stale tirades to voters who have heard it all before is a credibility problem.

Mamata Banerjee can thunder against the “double engine” model and that resonates with the public. Mr Modi can talk about “lies, lawlessness and loot”, as a description of the Mamata Banerjee government in its third term, or calling for real “pariborton”, that is change, is all old hat; trashing the Trinamul Congress for failing “Ma, Mati, Manush” (women, farmers and people) is a worn-out cliché.

The revised campaign content of the BJP’s biggest political asset points to an acknowledgement of a growing perception that the vote bank politics of the “Batenge Toh Katenge” sort that roiled public discourse in the run-up to the Maharashtra, Jharkhand and Delhi Assembly elections may not be as effective in 2025 and even in 2026 as it was in 2024. In the world inhabited by the BJP ideologically, there has to be an “Other”. Illegal Muslim infiltrators, who blend in local Muslim communities and create vote banks for parties like the TMC, have featured in BJP’s politics of identity for decades. It raises the piquant possibility of a new “Other” waiting to be discovered and unveiled to bring the BJP luck with its usual tactics of playing defence as a successful offensive manoeuvre.