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...