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The TMC vs BJP battle is set to heat up ahead of the 2026 West Bengal assembly elections
(Left) Bengal BJP’s answer to TMC’s creative (right).
With the West Bengal election a year away, Trinamool Congress (TMC) chief Mamata Banerjee held an organisational meeting and sent clear disciplinary instructions, even to top party leaders, not to badmouth consultant firm I-PAC.
While it gave the opposition Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) enough fodder, what irked them was a social media creative released by the party where the party is shown to be scoring “out” in the 2026 assembly election and called an “outsider” and “anti-Bengal”.
This tag cost the BJP dear in the 2021 assembly election when the BJP’s slogan was ‘Do sau paar’. The party couldn’t cross 100. In a post-election analysis, many senior Bengal BJP leaders told inside party forums that the “outsider” tag was a key reason.
TMC cadres widely campaigned on ground that if the BJP comes to power, primarily fish-eating West Bengal will be turned vegetarian, Bengali will be replaced with Hindi as the first language, and jobs will go to those from the Hindi heartland. This resulted in a fear psychosis which forced many BJP supporters to vote the other way in 2021, the BJP’s post-poll analysis stated.
Unlike in 2021, the BJP doesn’t want those allegations to be left unchallenged. The moment the creative came out, the BJP came out with its own creative calling it TMC’s “arrogance”. Interestingly, the BJP chose to phrase it in Bengali first and then in English, learning their lesson.
BJP Rajya Sabha MP Samik Bhattacharya told News18, “The TMC-led Bengal administration has announced a war on linguistic minorities… The BJP has started to flush out Rohingya from the voter list. This seems to be revenge.”
While the TMC has been trying to make a case to build an image of the BJP-led Centre denying funds for key projects such as MGNREGA, recently Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman too used strong words like “institutionalised corruption” while talking about alleged rampant corruption in MGNREGA and PM Awas Yojana in the Trinamool Congress-ruled state. “The TMC has institutionalised corruption, gutted institutions and Trinamool has become a byword for exploitation,” she had said in Parliament.
In December 2023, Banerjee claimed the Centre owed Bengal over Rs 1 lakh crore under various schemes.
