On May 4, 2026, when the news confirmed the BJP’s historic 207-seat mandate in West Bengal, the sociopolitical climate in Kolkata was marked by a high level of anxiety. Rather than celebrations, clashes erupted all over the State in the tradition of violence that has plagued Bengal after every election. Trinamool Congress offices were attacked within a few hours and the news of arson and injured people started circulating through social media.
However, by the night of May 6, the violence had moved up from street-level battles to assassination. Chandranath Rath, personal assistant and “shadow” of Suvendu Adhikari, who was sworn in as Chief Minister days later, was shot dead by motorcycle-borne gunmen near Kolkata airport.
In the two days after the release of the election results, West Bengal saw an unprecedented crackdown, with the police registering 200 cases, making arrests in over 430 cases, and securing preventive detentions of over 1,000 individuals. However, despite all these measures, at least 4 deaths occurred. While the parties have framed the violence as a “badla (revenge) vs badlav (change)” narrative, a significant tectonic shift is being overlooked.
What has taken place in West Bengal is not merely another change in government. It is the collapse of a political ideologythat lasted for over a hundred years. In order to understand what happened in 2026, it will be necessary to go beyond the act of violence and focus on the death of the bhadralok hegemony, the emergence of the commercial warrior, and bulldozer governance as the new grammar of power.
A common error among national observers is to interpret political violence in Bengal solely as a breakdown of law and order. In reality, violence in Bengal is a tool for social and political existence. After the collapse of the colonial agrarian system and the Partition of 1947, the State functioned within what the political scientist and JNU professor Dwaipayan Bhattacharya calls a “party-society”.
In this model, the political party is not merely an option on the ballot box but becomes the sole mediator for every sphere of life, from resolving family disputes to securing a government ration card. In this case, where the party is present in all the spheres of life that are usually occupied by civil society, the loss of an election is viewed as “existential annihilation”. When this year’s election results were declared, the violence was not a sign of chaos but a systematic attempt by the winner to “delete” the outgoing party’s infrastructure and install its own as the new social mediator.
Statistical evidence indicates that West Bengal consistently records the highest rate of “political murders” in India. According to the last published National Crime Records Bureau (NCRB) report, released in 2021, the average has been roughly 20 killings a year since 1999. Even during the 2019-21 period, reports indicated over 47 political deaths involving both Trinamool and BJP workers. This trend prevails because violence serves as a rational strategy for territorial control in a context where the state and the party are indistinguishable.
Death of the ‘bhadralok’ and rise of the new elite
For more than a hundred years, Bengal’s politics was the playground of the “bhadralok”, the landed, upper-caste, intellectual elite rooted in cultural capital. From early Congress leaders to later Marxist figures such as Jyoti Basu and even the populist firebrand Mamata Banerjee, the leadership always maintained its veneer of regional-intellectual pride.
The 2026 shift signifies the definitive end of the bhadralok hegemony. Research by Professor Zaad Mahmood of Presidency University, Kolkata, and Dr Soham Bhattacharya of Dr B.R. Ambedkar School of Economics University, Bengaluru, into the class composition of the new political elite reveals a significant transformation. The leaders in West Bengal politics are not poets or trade unionists; they are “wealthy, business-oriented candidates” from the non-corporate commercial class. This new elite relies on economic capital rather than cultural capital.
Suvendu Adhikari is a clear example of this change. Once a trusted aide to Mamata Banerjee, he broke away and became her strongest rival. Adhikari used his deep understanding of the Trinamool’s grassroots network to break it down from inside. He replaced the Trinamool’s “Ma-Mati-Manush” sub-nationalism with a consolidated Hindu identity, bringing together local business interests with a national civilisational story.
While the media extensively covered the communal flashpoints in Basirhat and Malda that helped secure the BJP its mandate, it largely overlooked the subsequent administrative shift. For many years, the “party-society” model depended on cadres to pressure people. The 2026 government has introduced a more clinical, state-backed model: bulldozer justice.
This is an example of punitive governance where the state’s administrative machinery rather than just the party’s muscle on the streets is employed to destroy the economic base of political rivals through legal means. This marks a shift from “party controlling state” to “state acting like a party”. The immediate use of the bulldozer after the 2026 election is not just about the tool itself; it is a sign that the state is not afraid to get its hands dirty without the buffer of local committees.
A hearse leaves a hospital morgue carrying the body of Chandranath Rath, an aide of Suvendu Adhikari, who was shot dead on May 6, in Kolkata on May 7.
| Photo Credit:
PTI
We must also consider the historical perspective of andolan (movement), which transformed West Bengal’s political DNA. In Bengal, the “street” rather than formal institutions has always been the primary site of political legitimacy. In 1959-1966, the State witnessed the Food Movement, with large-scale unrest among the people in the face of starvation. It caused great difficulty and embarrassment to the ruling Congress government at the time. Those protests, along with the radical anti-establishment movements of the late 1960s, established the “street” as the ultimate arena where power was won or lost in Bengal. Mamata recognised this and is considered the savviest street fighter of the times.
In the perception of the participants of the 2026 post-result violence, their actions are not anti-democratic. Instead, they regard them as a democratic rite, representing a necessary continuation of the struggle for territorial dominance. Consequently, the deployment of a record number of central security forces did not prevent the 2026 violence. Social tolerance for political conflict is so deeply ingrained in Bengal that the presence of security personnel becomes a minor detail within the broader historical context.
The employment-violence nexus
The most ignored dimension of the 2026 crisis is the economic reality of the rural hinterland. Political violence in Bengal persists because it is an economic activity. With industrial growth stalled for decades, young people have few options for regular jobs. Consequently, thousands of young men depend on political leaders for their livelihood. They do not work for corporations; they “work for the party”.
The violence we see in Bengal is fuelled by a “political labour force” that has no choice but to engage in territorial defence to protect their source of income. Until the new administration can actually provide industrial or service-sector jobs, these “boys” will continue to be the foot soldiers of whoever holds the purse strings of power, ensuring that the cycle of violence remains unbroken.
Finally, we must address the ideological consolidation of the State. This is the year Bengali Hindus appear to have voted as a consolidated Hindu identity bloc for the first time. This is a profound shift from the Bengali exceptionalism that has defined the State since the 19th century. However, this Hindu consolidation comes at a great price: the fear among the Muslim minority in neighbourhoods like Topsia and districts like Darjeeling. The fear is not just about physical safety, but about a redefinition of citizenship that awaits them. With saffron leaders invoking the Israel model and demanding the removal of “intruders”, the 2026 mandate is being interpreted on the ground as a mandate for exclusion.
A notable feature of the 2026 post-election violence is the public intervention by the Prime Minister and the RSS, calling for an end to the cycle of violence and warning against “Jungle Raj”. This introduces a tension between the central leadership’s need for democratic legitimacy and the local cadre’s impulse for “revenge”. West Bengal stands at its most critical juncture today since 1977.
While everyone pays attention to the throne of politics, the real story lies in the thorns. The political transition this year proves that despite the changing ideology, from the red star (Left Front) to the grass and flowers (Trinamool) to the lotus (BJP), the mechanism of power in Bengal is still based on territorial dominance, force, and the total displacement of the “other”. The true challenge for the government that has come into power will not be winning the next election but rather dismantling the infrastructure of violence it inherited and used to its advantage. If the new leaders, however, only replace one party committee with another, Bengal’s cycle of troubled democracy will continue.
Vishal Tiwari is a senior research fellow at Dr Harisingh Gour Central University, Madhya Pradesh.
Also Read | A closer look at Bengal’s tribal mandate
Also Read | Born again in saffron
