It might now be a faint trickle running on two emaciated tracks in Kolkata but shortly after Independence, the humble tram held India’s then largest metropolis in a vice grip. Since autumn 1947, the tramways corporation — which had not yet passed into Indian hands — was pushing for a fare hike. On June 22, 1953, the corporation notified a one pice (one-sixty-fourth of a rupee) hike in the second-class fare. In a moment of acute food shortage and millions of refugees streaming into Calcutta, the increase — backed by the State — ignited a powder keg of anger.
From July 1, hundreds boarded trams with old fares, organised passengers to carry mounds of change to deny conductors a chance at deducting higher fares, and violently clashed with police. Ubiquitous was the figure of the udbastu (refugee), mobilised by the nascent Left: a tubewell mechanic to uproot tram lines, women pouring water from balconies onto police, young men from refugee colonies manning barricades, wrote the refugee activist, Tejendralal Dutta. The Tram Fare Enhancement Resistance Committee fused the urban agitation with larger questions of refugee entitlements, workers, peasants and food. In two weeks, strikes and blockades by what historian Prafulla Chakrabarti called “Left Front in embryo” paralysed the city, forcing chief minister BC Roy to suspend the hike. Among the hundreds of activists released from jail was a young man named Jyoti Basu.
The Left’s early stirrings came in a decade that transformed Bengal — Partition and mass migration swelled its population by a third, pushing survival, hunger, and livelihood to the core of its politics. That first phase centred on the refugee; he’d be replaced by the peasant or factory worker in the second phase, and a white-collar aspirant in the current one. Through this journey, four things have held.
One, the size of the mandate. Bengal has not returned a close verdict in half a century. After the chaotic United Front years, only once has the winning alliance failed to cross 200 in the 294-member assembly, and the vote-share gap between the top two has never fallen below five percentage points. Even elections billed as close — 2001, 2021 — yielded landslides. This is partly because the panchayat holds far more power than elsewhere in India and is deployed as a party instrument to distribute benefits tied to the leader’s brand — an early iteration of labharthi (beneficiary) clientelism. In what political scientist Dwaipayan Bhattacharya calls a party society, this inevitably bleeds into violence because politics becomes territorial and muscular brazenness becomes the weather vane of electoral “hawa”. Structural barriers such as caste constrain free franchise in other states too, but only in Bengal does it tip so routinely into normative violence. Hence, power has changed hands just once in 50 years.
Two, violence can neither manufacture mandates nor arrest decline. The Left won for 34 years because it delivered land reorganisation, built a dense organisational network as the primary node of governance, and steadied a restive state. Mamata Banerjee has ruled for 15 years because she remains the state’s most popular face, fusing old-Left territoriality with caste and welfare politics, targeted at women. Conversely, the terror of the 2018 panchayat elections couldn’t stop the BJP’s rise, just as Left-sponsored clashes hadn’t prevented the Trinamool Congress from triumphing in 2008. The 2018 violence actually alienated the tribal-dominated Jangalmahal from the TMC; it took three more years, in a far less bloody election, to claw it back.
Three, the capital, Kolkata, commands an outsized grip on the national imagination of Bengal. Kolkata is an economic engine for India’s east, a cultural heavyweight and a magnet for both inter- and intra-state migration. Despite its modest electoral weight, successive governments have drawn senior leadership from the city — a measure of upper-caste dominance — and fed a myth of Bengali exceptionalism. Step outside the city and it dissolves: poor infrastructure and quality of life. Large swathes of Bengal today resemble their north Indian counterparts, so much so that resentment in north Bengal has spurred a counter-establishment vote.
Four, since the Congress was routed in 1977, no big national party has cracked Bengal. Chief ministers have fashioned politics in sharp opposition to Delhi — save brief interludes in the 1990s and late 2000s. This anti-establishment posture has helped coalesce a broadly left-of-centre agenda but cost the state Union largesse in an imperfect federal system. Having missed the bus twice — on the software revolution and the manufacturing boom powering India’s south and west — Bengal now has a ceiling against which young aspiration chafes. In a landscape where cash transfers feel routine and lose lustre after five years, that frustration has handed the BJP a genuine pole for its Hindutva-plus narrative.
In some ways, 2026 is an ordinary election. Bengal sits mid-table among India’s 28 states on per capita state domestic product, health and education. A beleaguered but popular incumbent is fighting anti-incumbency, rising aspiration, corruption and localised resentment. Facing off is a confident challenger with a radically different narrative, finally able to match in resource power but weak on local connect and boots on the ground.
In other ways, 2026 is unprecedented. Not since Partition has the undocumented immigrant — once a refugee, now a ghuspetiya (intruder) — sat so centrally in political discourse. The template is unchanged: the migrant blamed for deteriorating law and order, a livelihood crunch and space stolen from “locals” — the subject shifting from Hindu in the 1950s to Muslim now. Dalits find themselves on the same carousel of promised but elusive citizenship and backbreaking labour. In a landscape where numbers don’t ensure political relevance for Muslims — for example, they make up a third of Assam but cannot move the electoral needle — Bengal is a state where they can influence outcomes. Stung by targeted deletions, 2026, like 2021, is existential for them.
Most of all, 2026 is extraordinary in its design. The Election Commission has transferred more officials in Bengal than in any other poll-bound state by a factor of thirty, deployed more security forces and armoured vehicles than in Manipur, indulged in pointed political rhetoric, and invoked obscure rules to expel tourists from beaches and outsiders from buildings with polling booths. Supporters of the poll body can rightly claim that curtailing political violence is its core mandate, but the current approach runs the risk of being seen as partisan.
But a larger question looms. If, in another country, 2.7 million people were disenfranchised by a never-before-used system that used little-known software to red-flag surnames and spellings, if thousands were forced to travel hundreds of kilometres with their documents in plastic packets, waiting before tribunals that would not become fully functional until too late, if some election workers found themselves struck off the rolls, if a stand-off between the state and the Election Commission penalised the common voter, would that election be undisputed? Will there be accountability for officers who wrongly struck people with passports off the rolls? Or those who sacrificed genuine voters at the altar of statistically pure rolls in a rushed process? May 4 will not provide all the answers.
The views expressed are personal
