Bengal polls: Bhabanipur becomes battleground for prestige

In West Bengal’s political imagination, Bhabanipur is no longer just another south Kolkata Assembly seat. It is Mamata Banerjee’s political refuge and home turf, the BJP’s chosen psychological battlefield, where the stage is set for what many in Bengal are calling the “mother of all electoral contests”.

With Banerjee, the chief minister and three-term MLA from the constituency, locked in a direct contest with Leader of Opposition and BJP heavyweight Suvendu Adhikari, the April 29 election has turned Bhabanipur into the State’s most closely watched prestige fight.

Bhabanipur is effectively bracing for a symbolic rematch of Nandigram, where Adhikari defeated Banerjee, his once political mentor, in 2021 after quitting the TMC and joining the BJP.

Five years later, the duel has shifted to Banerjee’s own bastion. For the TMC, retaining Bhabanipur is about protecting the chief minister’s political authority in her own backyard. For the BJP, breaching it would mean puncturing the aura of invincibility around Bengal’s most powerful leader.

Spread across eight Kolkata Municipal Corporation wards, Bhabanipur is often called ‘mini India’ - a constituency where Bengalis coexist with Gujarati traders, Punjabi and Sikh households, Marwari and Jain families, alongside a sizeable Muslim electorate. Migrants from Bihar, Odisha and Jharkhand add another layer to the social mix.

Around 42 per cent of voters are Bengali Hindus, 34 per cent non-Bengali Hindus and nearly 24 per cent Muslims, making the constituency socially diverse and politically sensitive. It is precisely this arithmetic that appears to have encouraged Adhikari to challenge Banerjee on her home turf.

For months, the BJP has mapped Bhabanipur booth by booth. Party leaders claim Kayasthas make up 26.2 per cent of the electorate, Muslims 24.5 per cent, eastern Indian migrant communities 14.9 per cent, Marwaris 10.4 per cent and Brahmins 7.6 per cent.

The exercise, party insiders said, helped identify where Bengali Hindus dominate, where Hindi-speaking trader communities are concentrated, and which booths are likely to be influenced by Muslim voters, turning the constituency into a finely calibrated caste-community contest rather than a conventional urban seat.

Its political history mirrors Bengal’s own transformation. Once a Congress citadel represented by heavyweights like Siddhartha Shankar Ray, Bhabanipur disappeared after delimitation in 1972 and was revived only in 2011, the year Banerjee ended the Left Front’s 34-year rule.

Her close aide, Subrata Bakshi, first won the seat, vacated it, and Banerjee entered the assembly through the bypoll that effectively became her coronation as an MLA after being sworn in as chief minister. She retained the seat in 2016.

In 2021, she shifted to Nandigram but, after losing to Suvendu Adhikari by 1,956 votes, returned to the assembly through the Bhabanipur bypoll, defeating BJP’s Priyanka Tibrewal by more than 58,000 votes.

That history explains why, within the TMC, Bhabanipur is viewed not merely as a safe seat, but as Banerjee’s political insurance. Her Kalighat residence lies within the constituency, and long before it became her assembly fortress, its lanes and community clubs were central to her rise from Kolkata South MP to Bengal’s most dominant politician.

“This is not just another seat. People here have repeatedly stood by Mamata Banerjee’s politics of development and inclusiveness,” Kolkata Mayor and senior TMC leader Firhad Hakim said.

The TMC has also revived the emotional pitch of “ghorer meye” - the daughter of the house. At strategy meetings chaired by Bakshi, councillors were asked to push slogans around it.

The campaign is designed less around aggression and more around familiarity - Banerjee not as the chief minister, but as the neighbourhood’s own Didi. Welfare schemes such as Lakshmir Bhandar, Kanyashree and social security for women remain central to that appeal.

The BJP, however, believes the ground has shifted.

Its strategy rests on booth-level caste arithmetic, consolidation of Hindu votes across Bengali and non-Bengali communities, and turning Bhabanipur into a psychological contest through Adhikari’s candidature.

“The battle here cannot be fought with one slogan. It has to be fought booth by booth, community by community. The state now wants Ram Rajya. People are tired of appeasement politics,” BJP leader Debjit Sarkar said.

The BJP also draws confidence from electoral trends. It had shown signs of growth in Bhabanipur as early as the 2014 and 2019 Lok Sabha elections, and even won Banerjee’s own Kolkata Municipal Corporation Ward 73 in 2014.

The trend sharpened in the 2024 Lok Sabha polls, when the TMC’s lead in the Bhabanipur assembly segment fell sharply to just 8,297 votes, compared to Banerjee’s 58,832-vote margin in the 2021 bypoll. Significantly, the BJP finished ahead in five of the constituency’s eight wards, while the TMC led in only three.

The SIR of electoral rolls has added another strategic layer as its electorate shrank sharply to 1,55,291, with over 51,000 names deleted. Of these deletions, 23.3 per cent are Muslims and 76.7 per cent non-Muslims, TMC leaders maintained.

For the BJP, this strengthens the argument that the seat is now more competitive if Hindu consolidation holds, while for the TMC, it reinforces fears of disruption among the traditional support base.

Political analyst Biswanath Chakraborty said the contest is now as much psychological as electoral.

“By fielding Suvendu in Bhabanipur, the BJP is trying to convert the seat into another Nandigram, but this time on Mamata Banerjee’s home turf. For the TMC, defeating him here is necessary to restore political authority,” he said.

In Bengal’s high-stakes summer of symbols and survival, Bhabanipur is no longer just Mamata Banerjee’s safest seat - it is the battlefield where authority will be defended, ambition will be tested, and the first real verdict of 2026 may well be pronounced.