Shikha Mukerjee | No More a Festival: Polls Intense Battle for Power

The 2026 Assembly elections appear depressing. Elections were once a period of celebration; elections were the time the voter felt totally in control, wooed by the political establishment with folded hands. That moment of knowing they were powerful was exhilarating; this election is about fear and anxiety, of being confirmed as an Indian citizen by an institution and its machinery, namely the Election Commission. The voter has lost power, conceded control, surrendered agency to a system that can disqualify them as citizens.

The transformation of the content of campaign in the Narendra Modi era is staggering. In times past, leaders of national parties would painstakingly take the trouble to explain to voters, even during state elections, the issues that ought to concern them as Indians.

The connection between the local and the national and the international was a package that political parties, especially national leaders, delivered to voters in order to take them into confidence about what was happening in the world and how and why it mattered.

It was one of the ways in which voters were empowered by being informed. They were persuaded to think beyond their imprisonment within “narrow domestic walls,” as Gurudev Rabindranath Tagore wrote when he called for a new world “where the mind was free and without fear”. Voters were made to feel they were citizens of India and connected to the world.

There were other ways in which voters were nudged to think about themselves as part of the larger nation-state, of how human development was improving in other parts of the country and how their state needed to catch up with a better government and efficient administration. The discourse between leaders and voters was not limited to how bulldozers would be used to obliterate illegal encroachments by the phantom “ghuspaithiyas”, whose presence is suspected but never established, despite the Special Intensive Revision of electoral rolls for the purification of the process and to protect democracy.

The post-2014 general election transformation of the content of campaign communication was not dramatic. In Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s first term, his slogan was “Sabka Saath, Sabka Vikas”, an inclusive call for development, empowerment and affluence. The Ram Mandir issue was a big and polarising part of the BJP-led National Democratic Alliance government, as was the majority party’s agenda of winning every election in every state. By the second term and then on, with the imminent arrival of “Amrit Kaal”, the BJP’s success in capturing the popular imagination as an invincible vote-winning machine, the content of campaigns had hardened.

The BJP was the clean and good party; the rest were crooks, unless the rest cracked up or were cracked apart, processed through the “washing machine” and mutated into BJP cadres or allies. The Congress and regional parties were branded as anti-nationals, as thieves and looters, as proxies of the Muslim League and conspirators against national security and interests.

For weeks India’s Prime Minister Narendra Modi has been in election campaign mode. He has travelled from Kerala to Tamil Nadu to Assam, and is now virtually camping in West Bengal. India’s home minister Amit Shah has temporarily shifted base to West Bengal.

Beyond the geographies of these four election-bound states, there is the rest and larger part of India. And then there is the world, parts of which are plunged in war. These wars matter to India, because they are close to its boundaries, the closure and mining of the Strait of Hormuz through which a very large part of India’s gas supply travels, as does a third of its oil supplies, affects the lives of every Indian. The effects of the war on Iran impact India’s agricultural sector, its industries that use raw materials/chemicals produced from oil. The impact of the war in Iran, the mediation by Pakistan and its location as the neutral space for talks between the United States and Iran, are all of great concern to India and Indians.

It is as astonishing as it is remarkable that the BJP’s deafening campaign, and that of its star campaigner, Mr Modi, is virtually silent on what matters to voters in West Bengal and citizens across the country. The cost of a cylinder of gas has gone up, squeezing already tight household budgets; prices of cooked foods consumed by the affluent and the poor are equally affected, though not to the same degree.

If Mr Modi has campaigned about the impact of the increasingly unpredictable events in the world and the consequences for India, including the slowing down of a sluggish economy, it was such a low-level whisper that it did not register with anyone hoping to hear the Prime Minister talk about how India had handled and was planning to handle the future in an uncertain world.

No one expected Mamata Banerjee, fighting for her survival, meaning the survival of the Trinamul Congress, to talk about Iran, the United States and its President, Donald Trump. For one, these are issues that are alien to her politics and campaign. As the leader of a regional party battling the BJP in overdrive with its limitless resources, a phenomenal communication organisation and strategy and the capacity to mobilise and utilise the bigger and better resources of the Centre, she has neither the means nor the mind to grapple with issues that are outside the borders of her domain.

The trope of the evil “Other”, the demonising of the Muslims, of regional parties colluding in dismembering “Bharat”, the Hindu homeland and facilitating the creation of a “West Bangladesh” by carving up the Muslim majority districts of West Bengal is in play in the 2026 campaign for the state Assembly election.

It is curious that the BJP and its campaign managers are so intent on delivering a narrow and restrictive narrative. Voters are not meant to think beyond what the BJP tells them is their greatest concern, even though voters are also workers, migrate to other parts of India and the world.

Why send, that is export, people to far-away places if you cannot talk about those places to the people, directly and in person during the blitzkreig campaign in the four states that will deliver an electoral verdict on May 4? A government that consciously puts in place mechanisms to export Indians to other parts of the world, including Israel and Russia, which makes it possible for students to travel to Ukraine and Iran for education, the silence about world events and its consequences for Indians in the course of the long and intense campaigns is extraordinary.

Shikha Mukerjee is a senior journalist