Shikha Mukerjee | The ‘Khela Hobe’ Rematch in Bengal: Modi vs Didi in 2026

Going by the opening salvo in what will be the second historic Battle for Bengal, the next election will be a personalised contest between two charismatic leaders, both endowed with the gift of delivering attention-grabbing one-liners. In 2021, Mr Modi and his BJP lost the fight, flattened by the “Khela Hone” (game is on) call that Ms Banerjee deployed with spectacular success to marshal 28.65 lakh voters, or 48 per cent of the electorate. By the time the Lok Sabha elections came around in 2024, the BJP continued to fail at defeating the Trinamul

Congress; it won 12 parliamentary seats, down from 18 in 2019 and the TMC increased its tally to 29 Lok Sabha seats, up from 24 in 2019.

The moral of the story, if there’s a moral in no-holds-barred political fights, is fairly straightforward: persistence doesn’t pay, because the BJP playbook hasn’t hit upon the best way of the many ways a cat can be skinned, with apologies to animal rights advocates. Mr Modi’s North Bengal speech after Operation Sindoor was an updated version of past harangues focusing on how corruption, exclusion from Centrally-funded schemes, intimidation by the TMC political mafia, women’s insecurity had obstructed West Bengal’s progress and its inclusion in his visionary Viksit Bharat mission. He talked of Muslim appeasement and its effects on the Hindu majority.

West Bengal is a political prize that the BJP has set its heart on winning. The party and its leadership has a fundamental flaw, stasis, in its tactics and its strategy to overthrow the TMC, unseat its leader Mamata Banerjee and pull off an electoral victory. From the outside, West Bengal is like a perennial river; it is there and it is always in flow. From the inside, the river is perennial, but it is constantly changing, much like the river analogy of Heraclitus: “No man ever steps in the same river twice, for it’s not the same river and he’s not the same man.”

By the time the Assembly elections come around in 2026, much water will have flowed down the numerous rivers in West Bengal. Of the indisputable facts that confirm there has been a great deal of change since 2021, when in the first round of “Khela Hobe” was played, the first and foremost is the TMC is stronger today than it was in 2021. Instead of haemorrhaging, the party is picking up people from the BJP, which means that these leaders are bringing with them the crucial networks of influence and organisation that matter most in keenly contested elections.

Since the 2021 Assembly elections, the BJP has lost eight MLAs and three MPs. Going into the 2026 election, the BJP is today weaker than it was in 2021. It is incidentally weaker than it was in 2024; once an iconic tribal face of the BJP, John Barla, from Alipurduar has recently transferred his allegiance to the TMC. His reason for changing sides directly contradicts Mr Modi’s campaign speech in Alipurduar on May 22; the ex-MP said: “If development work is stopped by a party, how can you function? Why should I be part of a party that stops working for the people? Tea garden workers blessed the BJP, but what did they get in return?”

Before launching Operation Bengal, the name adopted by Suvendu Adhikari, the BJP’s Leader of the Opposition, to capture the state, he and his party should have thought it over many times. The BJP in West Bengal is openly in an internal fight, in what seems, unto death. In contrast, the internal friction in the TMC between the old guard and the new guard has settled down to some extent; Mamata Banerjee is in control and assertive about her prerogatives, while Abhishek Banerjee is both her understudy and her deputy.

There are voters in West Bengal who want a change, regardless of who comes after Didi is gone. And then there are voters in West Bengal who have an extraordinarily stubborn preference for maintaining the status quo, which is why the CPI(M)-led Left Front stayed in power for 34 years. The Bengali psyche is contradictory; it is timid and it is violent. It like the status quo and advocates revolution, including glorifying armed insurrection. It loves the tender-compassionate mother as it adores the vengeful-violent “nirmam” in her destructiveness goddess.

The BJP’s playbook for the border states in the east, including the Northeast, has remained unchanged. In state politics, its focus has been on the inundation of illegal Muslim immigrants whose integration as citizens is a consequence of the Muslim votebank politics of anti-Hindu parties, like the TMC, Congress, the CPI(M) and the Left Front. The tirade against illegal Muslims, Rohingya illegal settlements, Muslim men marrying tribal women and taking control of tribal lands played out in the Jharkhand election. In West Bengal, the BJP has consistently campaigned to tar Mamata Banerjee as anti-Durga Puja, anti-Hindu and pro-Muslim.

The party dragged in the Durga Puja to illustrate its political point, only to backtrack after Unesco listed the Durga Puja an intangible global cultural heritage. The campaign to smear her as anti-Hindu is effectively dead after the consecration and opening of the Jagannath Dham replica in Digha.

The BJP had hopes of gaining political advantage from the turmoil in Bangladesh and attacks on Hindu places of worship, but Operation Sindoor has shifted the focus from the east to the west and taking down terror networks in Pakistan is now the priority. In his Alipurduar speech, Mr Modi made it clear that his goal was to inflict unimaginable punishment on Pakistan.

Transferring attention from the east to the west has complicated repercussions on a hypersensitive electorate. The sense of relative deprivation, of always being second, that has haunted Bengalis ever since Partition vis-à-vis the west and Pakistan’s priority has begun to resurface in Kolkata. Winning the rematch in West Bengal in the 2026 Assembly elections will hinge on how the BJP and Mr Modi deploy culturally sensitive signs, such as Sindoor-Sindoor Khela (game with sindoor played at the conclusion of the Durga Puja). The one size fits all playbook is not the best manual for round two of “Khela Hobe”.