SIR, West Asia war may queer Bengal poll pitch

KOLKATA: Bengal elections, post-2011, have always been keenly fought though the result may not have reflected that. But the factors at play this season make the 2026 edition very different from the 2016 and the 2021 polls, again irrespective of the end-of-the-match score.

The contest may be happening on the same ground (the same 294 seats) but the playing conditions this time are without any precedence. A combination of three factors — SIR, a war whose epicentre (Tehran) is 3,700km away from Kolkata and an 11th-hour change in Raj Bhavan — makes for a riveting contest that pundits are having a hard time decoding.

The Trinamool won a super majority in 2021, two cycles after it ousted a Left Front regime entrenched in office for 34 years. The BJP this time is doing everything it can to repeat what the Trinamool did 15 years ago but may have been blindsided by something that no one saw coming: the rise in price of LPG, from the one that makes auto-rickshaws run to the one that makes kitchen fires burn.

The single biggest change in playing conditions this time, however, has been effected by the Special Intensive Revision (SIR) in electoral rolls.

The process may help the BJP in some seats in Kolkata and its periphery (by knocking out more Trinamool-aligned sections). But it may also work against the BJP in constituencies close to the India-Bangladesh border in North 24 Parganas and Nadia (by knocking out Matuas and Rajbangshis disproportionately).

Trinamool supremo Mamata Banerjee realised the potential danger, vociferously opposing the timing of the exercise — and its unachievable two-month schedule — from day one. And she has had her moments of triumph. The exercise has missed its own deadline and, in every neighbourhood, there are families scarred by SIR and its ever-evolving demands. Her appearance in the Supreme Court (as the “people’s petitioner”) showed voters that she had lost none of her fight-till-the-end instincts, even though the arena had shifted from Kolkata streets to a New Delhi courtroom.

SIR may leave a trail of questions that only the score at the end of the match can answer. But, even as the Trinamool and the BJP have been sparring over SIR, there has come another change in playing conditions: Donald Trump’s war on Iran.

Like in the rest of India, queues have lengthened in Bengal, from fuel stations to domestic LPG cylinder distribution centres. Most other states, however, are not going to the polling booth in a few weeks.

And it is in these long queues of angry voters that Banerjee — whose instincts for zeroing in on a political kill are without any match in Bengal — seems to have found an opportunity to neutralise the other playing conditions that may be tailor-made for the BJP. TurnBut, if the BJP has been blindsided by this war, the Trinamool’s war room, too, has been thrown in some amount of disarray by something that has not happened in Bengal in recent memory: a change in governor a few days before the poll announcement. The incumbent, R N Ravi, comes with a reputation made in Tamil Nadu and — for the Trinamool’s strategists — he may represent a far bigger danger than his predecessor, C V Ananda Bose, whom the Trinamool seemed to have “neutralised” to an extent.

There are, of course, other factors at play.

There has been a groundswell of support for the Trinamool after the introduction of the Yuva Sathi scheme (a monthly payout for class-X passouts looking for a job) and the increased allocation for Lakshmir Bhandar (a scheme for women). More than 81 lakh (more than 11% of Bengal's voters) queued up to be enrolled on the Yuva Sathi list.

And Banerjee, in yet another display of realpolitik, took two administrative decisions literally minutes before EC announced its poll schedule on Saturday: one agreed to pay out the enhanced dearness allowance for state staff as ordered by the Supreme Court; the other gave a 33% hike in the monthly payouts for both Hindu purohits and Muslim muezzins.

The BJP, too, can hope to tap into public anger at a host of administrative negatives, the biggest of them being the horrific rape and murder of a young medical intern at the state-run R G Kar Medical College and Hospital. The party has also focused on the repeated court verdicts on corruption scandals in recruitment processes in the education and municipal affairs departments even as PM Modi and union home minister Amit Shah have railed against the Trinamool for its “Muslim-appeasement politics”.

All these issues will weigh on voters. But they may have been pushed off the top-of-the-mind perch by the more recent developments: SIR and the war’s impact on household budgets and quality if life. These three factors have made a five-year Test match more like a 20-week T20 game, unpredictable and interesting, in which a lopsided result may not indicate how close the match was.