West Bengal: Making sense of the Mamata–Modi tango

Rumour is that Mamata Banerjee may have cut a deal with PM Modi that she keeps Bengal but bails out his government in the Lok Sabha

Bengal today is highly polarised, thanks to the BJP’s increasingly strident Hindutva pitch
Bengal today is highly polarised, thanks to the BJP’s increasingly strident Hindutva pitch
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Shikha Mukerjee

West Bengal politics can be frustratingly opaque to those outside the state. How are people to read the raging confrontation between chief minister Mamata Banerjee and BJP leader of the opposition Suvendu Adhikari? It’s all about identity politics, compromising secrets and intense competition in a tempestuous run-up to the 2026 election.

Funnily enough, in the slanging match between the chief minister and the state LoP, the adjudicator Mamata has said she’ll take her grievance to is PM Modi. Mamata has been accused of running a “government of mullahs”; a “Muslim League government”, and of “aiding and abetting Ansarullah”, a Bangladesh-based militant Islamist group whose leader Jasimuddin Rahmani was released recently by the Muhmmad Yunus government.

Mamata has declared she’ll write to PM Modi about this. Not to be outdone, Adhikari, sporting a most non-traditional saffron headgear (an expert was commissioned to do it just so), has declared he will complain to Union home minister Amit Shah, about being physically threatened by the chief minister.

The political space in Bengal today is highly polarised, thanks to the BJP’s increasingly strident Hindutva pitch, which has forced the anti-BJP opposition to play by their rules. But the latest confrontation between Banerjee and Adhikari has confused many.

One of the rumours doing the rounds is that Banerjee may have cut a deal with Modi that she gets to keep Bengal but must bail out his government in the Lok Sabha, if need be; her TMC (Trinamool Congress) is the third largest party in the Opposition.

The rumour has acquired substance ever since the Modi government was reduced to a minority after the 2024 Lok Sabha election.

Feeding this suspicion are two parties: the Communist Party of India (Marxist) which has consistently maintained that Mamata Banerjee opened a path for the BJP to enter West Bengal’s political arena after she joined the first National Democratic Alliance (NDA) government under Atal Bihari Vajpayee. The second party is surprisingly the Congress, which has, time and again, accused Mamata Banerjee of making unholy bargains with the Modi regime.

Congress leader Adhir Ranjan Chowdhury deplored West Bengal’s descent into communally incendiary politics, a stigma the state had avoided in the seven decades after Independence.

While it’s impossible to verify the allegation that Mamata Banerjee has an understanding with Modi, her rush to assert her ‘impeccable Brahmin lineage’ on the floor of the West Bengal assembly is clear for all to see. It is certainly not the first time that Mamata has identified herself thus — it dates back to the days when she was battling to oust the CPI(M) from power. Even as she inaugurated Durga Pujas while chanting the Chandi Paath (or Devi Mahatmyam), she lost no opportunity to castigate the CPI(M) as a godless party (of course).

The difference between then and now is the risk she has taken of trying to outmanoeuvre the BJP on its own turf as defender of the Hindu faith. While her compulsion to assert her Hindu credentials before the toughest election as leader of the TMC may be easy to understand, her failure to see the perils thereof are not. She only has to look at what befell Arvind Kejriwal in Delhi.

By foregrounding temple-talk — temples she has renovated as well the new temple to Lord Jagannath that she is getting built in Digha — Mamata Banerjee is playing by rules set by the BJP. That hue of politics includes deliberate confrontation over temples and religious sites, the Uniform Civil Code and the contested Waqf (Amendment) Bill. This could rattle Muslim voters in the state (over 26 per cent), whose choice in the 2026 election will impact over 120 state assembly constituencies.


Mamata Banerjee swept away the CPI(M) in 2011 by gaining the support of women, rural voters, especially the marginalised youth, marginal farmers, landless labour, Muslims and the anti-CPI(M) brigade. Hindu appeasement was never an element of her original agenda.

She kept her promise to give Muslims a better deal than the CPI(M) had, which earned her the reputation of vote bank politics. She did woo Muslim religious leadership especially the heads of the Furfura Sharif in Hooghly and the imams of various significant masjids in the state.

By itemising her work for the Hindus of Bengal, Mamata Banerjee seems to have stepped into a maze of the BJP’s making. Unless she course-corrects soon, Hindutva could become the dominant issue in the 2026 election. That would pit her against Modi on the one hand and the RSS on the other and make her fight infinitely more difficult.

To bolster BJP’s shaky organisation in West Bengal, RSS chief Mohan Bhagwat has been on a longish (though underplayed) visit to the state. Gathering cadres at the grassroots into a political force will undermine both the TMC and its leader. This mobilisation by the RSS (particularly in the south of the state) contradicts the allegation of any ‘setting’ between Mamata and Modi. It is unlikely that Bhagwat would be party to a deal that would gift West Bengal away.

Adding to the puzzle is the abrupt change in West Bengal governor C.V. Ananda Bose’s behaviour. In 2024, he raised a fuss about reading out the governor’s speech at the start of the budget session of the state assembly. One year on, he dutifully read out every word of the script handed to him.

Mamata Banerjee’s pitch in the West Bengal state assembly to counter Adhikari’s charge of being a stooge of the Muslim League suggests she is in damage control mode. In the six by-polls held in November 2024, her party gained in vote share, indicating that the TMC is still the preference of about half the state’s population. The BJP’s vote share in 2024 was 38 per cent and it has declined since.

Assembly elections in West Bengal are crucial for all the parties in the fray. For Mamata Banerjee, the 2026 assembly election is an opportunity to add to the political capital she has already amassed. With a fourth stab at power, she knows that anti-incumbency is inevitable, especially among voters who mobilised spontaneously in the streets to condemn her administration’s failures as exposed in the R.G. Kar incident in which a junior doctor was allegedly raped and murdered.

Up against a revived Modi, the fight to keep her hold over West Bengal will be tough and ugly; it could also be dangerously volatile. It could end up as the campaign in Delhi did, where the Congress and the BJP amplified each other’s position by targeting Arvind Kejriwal as the common enemy.

In past elections, both the CPI(M) and the Congress have targeted Mamata Banerjee, making them inadvertent allies of the BJP. This could happen again in 2026, adding more variables to an already complicated problem.

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