In many ways, Assembly Election 2026 in West Bengal was truly historic. Segregation of society based on communal binary becoming the primary deciding factor in the poll results is truly unprecedented for the State. As if, issues like health, education and transportation were not enough important to decide the fate of the State, so people of west Bengal given more importance to upholding religious faith over anything else. At least if you closely follow the campaigning of ruling party TMC and the main opposition BJP. Then the mandate of people came, where TMC government get toppled by the BJP overwhelmingly. But even after such a thrashing defeat CM and TMC Supremo Mamta Bsanerjee blatantly refused to leave her chair defying all logic and turning her face against the basic democratic courtesy and norms. Although, one might argue that if she ever at all showed respect and moral conduct to parliamentary democracy. For her it was always ‘my way or highway’. During 15 years of her regime in West Bengal (2011-2026), she has displayed fascistic narcissism in every stage. Slightest opposition on her views begot ruthless strangling by the machineries under the administration. Like all fascist, criminalisation and institutionalisation of corruption became the driving force of the system and thus made life hell of the citizens. I believe it would be a subject of research on coming years that how; she was able to rule for 15 long years in a State that forms a part of the world’s largest democracy. People saw limitless corruption in every facet of society, terror as the primary weapon unleashed and getting a freehand from government machineries. Dole politics became the main cash flow of the state in her regime. No significant industrialisation, be it private or govt. took place in her period, nor existing vacancies in various govt. sector got filled up. Instead, govt jobs illegally sold against bribe under the direct influence of govt. machinery and section of corrupt politician and bureaucrat nexus.
Law & order, health, education or for that matter all other aspect of a civil society were completely broken down to pieces and anarchism prevailed everywhere. Hooliganism became common norms. Add to it, infiltration of cross border immigrant made situation much worse as TMC tend to patronize shamelessly to the minority community. Backdrop of all this, it was a question of not only survival for people of West Bengal, but also question of maintaining structure of Republic of India, where our constitution upheld equal right for all religions. Significant was this election because, electoral procedure was conducted with a comprehensive revision and stringent verification of voters, making sure, voter list remain flawless as far as possible. Although, there were questionable glitches during this process, but by and large it was satisfactory. Election Commission of India (ECI) after taking over the law and order of the state well in advance of the voting day, made sure Central forces gets deployed and work in unbiased manner towards conducting free and fare election.
As a result of this, people of west Bengal came out in numbers and voted like never before. A staggering average of 92.47% voters has participated in election which is unprecedented. This number itself indicated that this election is going to be something special and a landslide result for BJP occurred. At last 15 years of fascistic, autocratic and top to bottom corrupted government were topple in people’s mandate. But this is not the end of the act though, what happened after this was even horrendous. Mamta Banerjee, even after conceding such a thrashing defeat, not agreed to accept it and even did not leave her post. This kind of self narcissism and audacity, I don’t remember if ever happened in our parliamentary democracy. May be, the US president Donald Trump, can be referred to as an example.
However, thankfully, our constitution has got provision under the power of Honourable Governor and he exercised his power to oust such a maniac and saved our State from further sliding down. Coming back to current scenario, BJP, led by Subhendu Adhikary, after coming to power by huge mandate of people, have started their journey with a positive approach and apparently seems to be steadfast towards keeping up to the pre-poll promises. It is now to be seen how far they keep up to the promises they made to the people of West Bengal.
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