The BJP announced a list of 40 star campaigners for the Bengal assembly elections, featuring MPs Hema Malini and Kangana Ranaut, alongside prominent leaders like Prime Minister Narendra Modi, Home Minister Amit Shah, and UP chief minister Yogi Adityanath.
The list also include Mithun Chakraborty, Leander Paes, Smriti Irani, Assam CM Himanta Biswa Sarma, Delhi CM Rekha Gupta and also chief ministers of Maharashtra Devendra Fadnavis and Tripura Manik Saha. Among the BJP leaders in the state are Dilip Ghosh, Suvendu Adhikari and Samik Bhattacharya (state unit president).
Is TMC’s “Jabar Bela” finally here?
Meanwhile in West Bengal, Mamata Banerjee expected people to raise hands when she posed a question about SIR; but the crowd’s silence at that rally suggests 'Mamata's Jabar bela is no longer unthinkable'
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| File snap of Mamata's 'achhey din' |
Utter Nervousness and Frustration grips 'gimmick queen' of Bengal
TMC chief has already warned of possible tampering with Electronic Voting Machines (EVMs).
Addressing the press conference in Kolkata; Mamata Banerjee said, “The BJP is not just bringing in voters from Bihar and Uttar Pradesh. They are bringing in crowds of paid supporters from those states.
And along with them, they are trying to import the worst elements of their culture into Bengal.”
Ground Zero
From Adhir Ranjan Chowdhury being heckled off the campaign trail to NIA investigators reconstructing a judicial hostage crisis in Malda — and a Mamata Banerjee rally where the crowd refused to perform on cue.
Something shifted in West Bengal this week.
Three incidents — a veteran former MP heckled off a street corner, seven judges held hostage in a BDO office, and a crowd that fell silent when Mamata Banerjee needed them to cheer — are individually significant.
Together, they read like a pattern.
The phrase doing the rounds in Bengal’s political corridors is Jabar Bela — literally, the time to go.
Whether that time has truly arrived for the Trinamool Congress in the 2026 Assembly elections is the question every political observer in Kolkata is now asking.
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| Modi with Key Bengal BJP leaders |
On Saturday morning, veteran Congress leader and five-time former Lok Sabha MP Adhir Ranjan Chowdhury was campaigning near BT College in ward 19 of Behrampore town when a group of Trinamool Congress supporters, reportedly led by party councillor Bhiswadeb Karmakar, surrounded his convoy and began raising slogans of “Adhir Chowdhury go back.”
The sloganeering escalated into a face-off between the two camps. Chowdhury cut short his campaign and left — this, despite the presence of central forces at the site.
The optics were damaging on multiple levels. Central forces deployed to ensure free and fair campaigning stood by while a five-term MP was driven off a public street by political muscle. And the target was not an obscure local figure. In the 2024 Lok Sabha elections, Chowdhury was defeated in Baharampur by TMC nominee Yusuf Pathan — a former cricket star from Gujarat parachuted into Bengal specifically to unseat him. He lost. He is back. And he is still being heckled.
The incident poses an uncomfortable question for Rahul Gandhi and the Congress high command: what exactly do they intend to say about secularism and “vote-theft” politics in West Bengal, and when?
The Rally Moment That Told a Bigger Story
But perhaps the most politically revealing incident of the week happened not in a courtroom or on a campaign street — it happened at a TMC election rally.
Mamata Banerjee, addressing supporters, asked the gathering:
“How many of you stood in long lines for SIR?”
She expected a forest of raised hands. She got silence. She repeated the question. Still silence. She reportedly said, with visible puzzlement: “What happened, why so silent?”
Then came what can only be described as the Rahul Gandhi variety of political instinct — the retreat to a familiar grievance when the current one fails to land. She pivoted: “How many of you stood in long lines during demonetisation?” The crowd responded.
The moral is plain. The SIR drive, whatever its actual impact on the ground, has not registered as an outrage in the popular imagination the way the 2016 note-ban did. Mamata read the room — but only after the room had already told her something uncomfortable.
This is what happens to demagogues in the middle-age of their political dominance. The crowd sense — that extraordinary ability to feel what a gathering feels before it knows it itself — begins to slip. It happened to others. It is happening in Bengal in 2026.
Mamata Banerjee is in danger of contracting what might be called the Rahul Gandhi syndrome:
the tendency to blame all others for a poor show while remaining blind to what the mirror is saying.
In Rahul Gandhi’s case, it produced years of post-defeat analysis that pointed everywhere except inward. In Mamata’s case, the 2026 election may be producing a similar reckoning — except that she, unlike Gandhi, actually runs a government and therefore has far more to lose.
The Jabar Bela may not have arrived. But the crowd’s silence at that rally suggests it is no longer unthinkable.
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