BJP Is Not Giving Mamata Banerjee The Fight She Wants

Avoiding the 'insider versus outsider' battle

On 20 February, Bengal Bharatiya Janata Party chief Samik Bhattacharya found himself doing something unusual for a saffron leader in the state: clarifying that his party had no intention of banning fish or meat in West Bengal.

Provocation and patience

The trigger was a Bihar government directive restricting non vegetarian shops near schools and religious places, a regulation that had nothing to do with Bengal. Within hours, however, the Trinamool Congress had drawn it into the state's political conversation, with Mamata Banerjee warning of a creeping assault on Bengali food culture.

The TMC's social media declared, "মাছে ভাতে বাঙ্গালী (A Bengali with fish and rice) is a thorn in BJP's side, a defiant emblem of Bengali identity that refuses to bow."

The aggressive tone is revealing, not of strength but of frustration. For the first time in a Bengal election cycle, the BJP has refused to take the bait. The provocations have come in quick succession, each designed to drag the BJP into the outsider versus daughter binary, which helped Mamata Banerjee secure her 2021 landslide: 213 seats and 47.9 per cent of the vote against the BJP's 77 and 38.1.

In January, the removal of non vegetarian items from the menu of the Howrah Kamakhya Vande Bharat Sleeper Express produced similar performative outrage. Rather than responding aggressively, the BJP led Union government quietly revised the menu, a move its supporters viewed as capitulation but one that denied the TMC the confrontation it sought.

Then came the amplification of Bengali pride on the Parliament floor. Over the past year, the TMC has highlighted every Bengali migrant allegedly harassed in BJP ruled states. The lynching of Juyel Rana in Odisha's Sambalpur, detentions in Chhattisgarh and Rajasthan, and the Jai Hind Colony episode in Delhi were among the major incidents the TMC selected.

Mamata Banerjee even led a protest march in Kolkata.

Abhishek Banerjee, speaking in Parliament on 10 February, delivered a line calibrated for virality. "I come from an India where speaking Bengali makes you a Bangladeshi, eating fish makes you Mughal, saying 'Joy Bangla' is enough to brand you as a ghuspaithiya (infiltrator)," said Banerjee. At the Martyrs' Day rally, he had declared that the BJP would be compelled to chant Joy Bangla after the 2026 results.

On 15 February, the TMC imposed a Bengali only whip inside the Kolkata Municipal Corporation. On 24 February, after the Union Cabinet approved Kerala's transition to Keralam, Mamata described the BJP as Bangla birodhi for allegedly burying West Bengal's proposal to become Bangla.

Each move follows the same logic of provoking the BJP into attacking Mamata personally and then projecting martyrdom in response. For the BJP, the challenge is that the Overton window remains tilted towards the TMC. Even a mildly aggressive response risks being interpreted as tacit acknowledgement of what the TMC portrays them to be, the outsider seeking local relevance.

The BJP has recognised this asymmetry. Rather than operating within Mamata's frame, it has chosen to approach the Bengali identity question from the periphery, without being drawn into Didi's centrifugal arc.

Track the calibration

In December 2025, when Prime Minister Modi addressed the Bihar victory rally, senior BJP functionaries drew a direct comparison between Lalu's Jungleraaj and Banerjee's governance record, citing extortion, syndicate rule, and the collapse of law and order. There was sufficient material to frame Mamata as anti Bengali, yet the party focused instead on governance. There was no reference to culture, no provocation on food or language, and no personal slight.

A month later, Modi's open letter to Bengal, timed to Republic Day week, reiterated the same emphasis on development, safety and opportunity. It did not invoke the outsider insider binary. Meanwhile, the CAA infiltration axis continues to operate as a pressure valve in the border belt, but it is channelled through Bihar rather than Bengal.

Amit Shah's three day tour of Seemanchal, covering Kishanganj, Araria, Purnia and Katihar, concluded with the launch of SSB border projects and the announcement of a crackdown on infiltration, all on Bihar's soil.

Seemanchal shares a border with northern Bengal and serves as the gateway to the Siliguri Corridor. By acting there rather than in Siliguri, Shah keeps demographic anxiety alive without providing the TMC with footage of central agencies operating on Bengali soil. The infiltration debate remains active. The regionalism frame remains dormant.

Nitin Nabin's elevation as BJP National President aligns with the same logic. A Kayastha from Bihar, his caste identity speaks directly to Bengal's Bhadralok paradigm of Brahmins and Kayasthas. His Bihar roots position him as culturally proximate to Bengal without attracting the distant outsider label that proved politically damaging for V K Pandian in Odisha.

However, the signal operates in both directions. Nabin also appeals to Bengal's Hindi speaking population, which constitutes less than 10 per cent of the electorate and influences approximately three dozen seats. This segment has long felt marginalised under the TMC's Bengali sub nationalism, often labelled as Bahirgato, the outsider.

The BJP also has a template for what happens when a national party successfully navigates the regionalism question. In Odisha last year, it ended Naveen Patnaik's 24 year rule not by attacking Odia asmita but by claiming guardianship of it. The party targeted Pandian as the non Odia successor, raised concerns about the missing Ratna Bhandar keys of the Puri temple, channelled anxiety about non Odia firms dominating state contracts, and won 78 of 147 assembly seats.

The lesson from Odisha was that regionalism is only as strong as the credibility of the individual invoking it. The BJP lacks that credibility on Bengali identity. It therefore requires an alternative anchor, similar to the strategy it adopted in Odisha.

The regional Hindutva

The BJP does possess credibility on the protection of Hindu practitioners, whose pantheon varies regionally. When Modi addressed a rally in Durgapur in July 2025, he opened with Jai Maa Kali and Jai Maa Durga, not Jai Shree Ram.

In 2021, Jai Shree Ram had become a flashpoint. Mamata converted the BJP's aggression into political advantage, and the TMC responded with its own articulation of regional Hinduism, feminine, syncretic, and embedded in Bengali ritual life. The BJP has since internalised that lesson.

This devotional recalibration is a conduit to roughly 50 per cent of the electorate already alienated by Gundaraaj, illegal migration, and the shock of RG Kar Medical College. For these voters, the grievance is not primarily about identity.

That anger has a distinct anatomy.

The TMC's coalition rests on three pillars: near total Muslim consolidation across approximately 27 per cent of the electorate, rural women connected to welfare schemes such as Lakshmir Bhandar and Swasthya Sathi, and urban middle-class sentiment that once viewed Mamata as the daughter who challenged Delhi.

The RG Kar rape murder of August 2024 destabilised the third pillar in a manner no BJP campaign could have orchestrated. The body of a 31-year-old postgraduate trainee, discovered in a seminar room on 9 August, triggered not a party political mobilisation but something far more consequential for the TMC—a spontaneous and apolitical uprising.

A 42-day medical strike followed, along with three Reclaim the Night marches beginning at midnight on 14 August. Former students from more than 40 schools marched through south Kolkata, and rickshaw pullers organised separate processions. Participants consciously rejected BJP and CPI(M) banners.

This was not an opposition rally that Mamata could dismiss. It was the Bhadralok, her own base, mobilising against her.

In the 2024 Lok Sabha elections, the BJP led in 69 of 121 urban bodies, compared to the TMC's 51. A Vote Vibe survey from mid 2025 recorded 53.2 per cent anti-incumbency, with 49.1 per cent stating that RG Kar and Sandeshkhali had undermined Mamata's credibility.

Subsequently came the alleged gang rape of a medical student in Durgapur, followed by Mamata's remark questioning why the victim was out late at night. That sentence inflicted greater damage on the Didi persona than any BJP campaign line could have achieved.

The BJP's assessment is that this constituency must be mobilised around governance failures and women's safety rather than identity.

This broader strategy also provides it with the leverage to contest four segmented elections under a single banner.

Discussion of a separate mini manifesto for north Bengal's eight districts foregrounds ethnic aspiration and border security, drawing on the Rajbanshi consolidation that delivered 30 of 54 seats to the BJP in 2021 and the still unmet CAA promise for Matuas.

Through the Sankalp Patra Paramarsha Yatra, the party has converted manifesto drafting into a public consultation exercise, complete with drop boxes, phone lines and constituency-specific feedback. "We could have prepared the manifesto sitting in Kolkata, but we are here to listen," said Swapan Dasgupta.

In Jangalmahal, the emphasis is on governance and the Kurmi community's Scheduled Tribe demand. The ultimatum of first ST status, then vote places pressure on 14 BJP-held seats.

In urban Bengal, the focus is on women's safety and corruption. Along the Seemanchal corridor, it is demographic anxiety.

This discipline is not without strain. Kurseong MLA Bishnu Prasad Sharma's defection to the TMC and Kamtapur leader Jiban Singha's threat to field independent candidates underscore how unfulfilled ethnic commitments can create tangible vulnerabilities, particularly in north Bengal.

In south Bengal, the TMC's organisational machinery remains formidable, and the BJP still lacks the depth required to convert anti-incumbency into seats where it has historically had no cadre base.

Yet the broader trajectory favours patience. The TMC's regionalism trap functions only if the BJP engages with it. Unlike Tamil Nadu, where Dravidian identity politics has been institutionally self-reproducing for five decades, Bengali asmita is personality dependent, scarcely a decade old, and sustained largely by Didi's charisma.

Every unanswered provocation exposes that fragility, and many have indeed gone unanswered. The non-vegetarian ban controversy subsided within seventy two hours. The Bangla renaming demand faded within a single news cycle. Mamata is expending significant energy constructing a confrontation that is not materialising.

Meanwhile, the BJP is methodically assembling a coalition drawn from devotion, caste aspiration, tribal grievance and urban anger, on its own terms and in its own idiom. The only question is whether this discipline endures until polling day. In Bengal's electoral history, it rarely has. In 2026, it may prove decisive.