BJP looks to crack Kolkata conundrum in second phase

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Kolkata: Kolkata has long been the city that has eluded the Bharatiya Janata Party. Even in the 2021 Assembly elections, when the saffron wave washed over much of rural Bengal and the party secured 77 seats statewide, it drew a blank inside the city limits.

The Kolkata Municipal Corporation’s 144 wards, spread across constituencies that were once Congress strongholds and later Left bastions before the Trinamool Congress colonised them comprehensively after 2011, have remained stubbornly resistant to the BJP’s advances.

The second phase of the 2026 West Bengal Assembly elections on April 29 will see the party’s most determined attempt yet to change that. At the centre of that bid is Bhabanipur—Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee’s home constituency—where the BJP has thrown its most powerful political weapon: Suvendu Adhikari, the Leader of the Opposition who narrowly beat Banerjee herself in Nandigram in 2021.

But the Kolkata story in 2026 is much wider than one seat, extending across a string of South and North Kolkata constituencies where the party is contesting with unusual seriousness, betting that the Special Intensive Revision (SIR) controversy, the R.G. Kar Medical College rape and murder case, the school recruitment scam, and 15 years of accumulated anti-incumbency have finally softened ground.

BHABANIPUR: THE PRIZE FIGHT

Everything in the BJP’s Kolkata strategy radiates outward from Bhabanipur. The constituency—comprising eight wards of the southern city, with a cosmopolitan electorate that includes Gujarati, Sindhi, Bihari, Muslim and Christian communities alongside Bengalis—is the Chief Minister’s turf, and the BJP knows that defeating her here would be the single most consequential result of the entire election.

The numbers make the contest less straightforward than it once appeared. Bhabanipur had 206,295 voters when the SIR process began last November. By the time the final rolls were published, 47,094 names had been struck off—a figure only about 11,000 short of Banerjee’s 58,000-vote winning margin in the 2021 byelection. The 2026 electorate now stands at 161,525—a dramatic shrinkage that has set off fierce political speculation.

Suvendu Adhikari filed his nomination from Bhabanipur in a high-profile roadshow with Union Home Minister Amit Shah by his side—a gesture widely read as indicating that he is the BJP’s implicit Chief Ministerial face should the party win. He is contesting from both Nandigram and Bhabanipur simultaneously.

Banerjee has responded by turning her campaign into a community mobilisation exercise, holding outreach meetings with Christian, Muslim, Sikh, Jain, Gujarati, Sindhi, Bihari and ISKCON communities. Congress has fielded Pradeep Prasad, while CPI(M)’s Shrijeeb Biswas, a familiar face from past contests in this seat, rounds out a genuinely four-cornered fight.

KOLKATA PORT: HAKIM’S FORTRESS UNDER PRESSURE

A few kilometres south, at the historic Garden Reach and dock areas, Kolkata Mayor Firhad Hakim is defending one of the TMC’s safest urban seats—but doing so against a backdrop of controversy that has made the task harder than it looks.

The constituency’s 2026 electorate stands at 179,735 after a post-SIR decline of 30.55%, among the sharpest in the city. The majority-Muslim, working-class seat—historically shaped by the dock mafias that shifted allegiance between the CPI(M) and Congress before TMC’s consolidation after 2011—has seen 22.3% of its names deleted outright, with more under adjudication.

The BJP has fielded Rakesh Singh, who has served time in jail and is currently out on bail, while the Congress has nominated Aquib Gulzar, and CPI(M) is running Faiyaz Ahmad Khan, seeking to reclaim the labour and working-class base historically aligned with the Left.

Hakim faces a local controversy of his own: he and his councillors have been accused of enabling illegal constructions in the area, which has led to a deadly building collapse. The Opposition is counting on that anger, alongside the SIR deletions, to erode what has previously been an impregnable majority.

RASHBEHARI: TEMPLE, SKYWALK AND SYNDICATE RAJ

Rashbehari Avenue is one of South Kolkata’s most storied arteries, and its Assembly constituency— described by BJP candidate Swapan Dasgupta as “probably the seat with the highest per capita income in West Bengal”—has become the theatre for one of the election’s more intellectually charged contests.

Sitting TMC MLA Debasish Kumar faces Dasgupta, the journalist-politician and former Rajya Sabha MP who lost in Tarakeswar in 2021 but is being given another chance by the BJP in friendlier terrain. Amit Shah and Suvendu Adhikari accompanied Dasgupta’s nomination filing with a roadshow. Congress candidate Ashutosh Chatterjee, who won only 8.4% votes in 2021, is also in the contest.

The Kalighat Temple—one of the 51 Shakti Peethas—sits at the constituency’s political heart. Dasgupta visited it to project a Hindutva narrative; the TMC is countering with the Kalighat Skywalk, inaugurated by Mamata Banerjee in April 2025, as a development credential. The TMC is also deploying its Lakshmi Bhandar scheme heavily, given that women are a large share of the electorate.

Kumar’s position is complicated, however, by an ED summons in a land-grabbing case and income-tax searches at locations linked to him. Dasgupta’s campaign has focused on “syndicate raj” and real-estate mafia control as the defining local grievances—framing himself as the agent of reform in a constituency where prosperity and corruption coexist uneasily.

BALLYGUNGE: THE VOID LEFT BY SUBRATA MUKHERJEE

Across the leafy lanes of South Kolkata’s most affluent residential neighbourhood, Ballygunge is entering 2026 with an unusual degree of uncertainty. For three consecutive terms, the seat was the fiefdom of the late Subrata Mukherjee, one of the city’s most beloved politicians. His death, and the subsequent 2022 byelection won by singer Babul Supriyo—who has since departed for the Rajya Sabha—have left the TMC without its longstanding anchor in the constituency.

The party has brought in Sovandeb Chattopadhyay, a veteran who previously vacated Bhabanipur to make way for Mamata Banerjee’s 2021 byelection and was then relocated to Khardah. The BJP has countered with Dr Shatrupa, a fresh face calibrated to appeal to the constituency’s professional, educated middle class. The 2026 electoral rolls show the SIR has pruned the voter base substantially from the 2021 total of 247,662—with 6,174 voters found ineligible in the adjudication process, triggering sharp exchanges between the parties. The contest is primarily bipolar, with the Left and Congress also present but not decisive.

NORTH KOLKATA

The BJP’s Kolkata offensive does not stop at the South Kolkata boundary. In the Kolkata North constituencies, the party has invested heavily, importing star campaigners and fielding candidates with urban credibility.

BELEGHATA: A SAFE SEAT, A NEW FACE

Straddling the boundary between central and east Kolkata, Beleghata (constituency No. 164)—composed of Ward Nos. 28, 29, 30, 33, 34, 35, 36 and 57 of the Kolkata Municipal Corporation—is a densely populated, entirely urban seat encompassing the working-class and lower-middle-class neighbourhoods of Beleghata, Phoolbagan and adjoining areas. Its mixed Hindu and Muslim population gives it a demographically diverse character distinct from many other Kolkata North seats, with 253,802 registered electors as per the 2024 voter list. The SIRdriven revision is expected to have trimmed this figure for 2026, though precise post-SIR numbers have not been separately published for this seat.

In 2021, the TMC commanded 65.1% of votes here against the BJP’s 22.74% and CPI(M)’s 8.86%—as comfortable a margin as the party enjoys anywhere in the city. Yet for 2026, the TMC has not renominated sitting MLA Paresh Paul, fielding instead Kunal Kumar Ghosh as its candidate—a significant change of guard that introduces a degree of uncertainty into what has been a safe seat.

The BJP has fielded Partha Chaudhury, while the Left Front’s candidate is Paromita Roy of CPI(M); the Left-Congress seatsharing arrangement means no separate Congress candidate has been fielded, making this a primarily triangular contest.

The warning signs for the TMC are visible in the 2024 Lok Sabha numbers: the BJP polled 27.61% in this segment against the TMC’s 54.97%, with Congress at 14.66%—a narrowing that mirrors trends elsewhere across the city. The party will need its new candidate to quickly establish local credibility.

State-wide issues—the school recruitment scam, women’s safety, employment, the SIR voter-roll controversy, and 15 years of anti-incumbency against TMC rule—all play out in Beleghata alongside local concerns around urban infrastructure, housing, and the livelihoods of its large working-class population.

CHOWRINGHEE: A CHANGED SEAT, A CHANGED CONTEST

At the heart of the city, where once two Chief Ministers—Bidhan Chandra Roy and Siddhartha Shankar Ray—were elected on Congress tickets, the TMC’s Nayana Bandyopadhyay is seeking a third term. Her opponent is Santosh Pathak—who, strikingly, contested this very seat for the Congress in 2021 and has since crossed over to the BJP. Mamata Banerjee campaigned here personally. The Left Front is fielding RCPI’s Sanjoy Basu. Pathak’s defection gives the BJP both local credibility and a ready-made opposition narrative about TMC’s failure to hold its ground even among traditional Congress supporters.

JORASANKO: NONBENGALI VOTE HOLDS THE KEY

At Jorasanko—birthplace of Rabindranath Tagore and cradle of the Bengal Renaissance—the electoral story of 2026 is a commercial, not a cultural, one. Burrabazar’s non-Bengali trading community now dominates the electorate, and all four major parties have responded by fielding non-Bengali candidates. The TMC has replaced sitting MLA Vivek Gupta with Vijay Upadhyay, a two-time KMC councillor. The BJP’s candidate is Vijay Ojha, another corporator known for his oratory. The Left’s Bharat Ram Tiwari and Congress’s Deepak Singh complete the field. Jorasanko has the distinction of having suffered the highest voter-deletion rate in the entire state—36.85%, or nearly 72,900 names— and in the 2024 Lok Sabha election, the BJP outpolled the TMC 46.61% to 39.61%.

UP Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath held a rally here for Ojha, underlining the seat’s importance to the party’s Kolkata calculus.

SHYAMPUKUR: PANJA VS CHAKRABORTY

In Shyampukur, the bipolar TMC-BJP contest has been sharpening steadily for over a decade. The BJP’s vote share has risen from 3.6% in 2011 to over 32% in 2021, and by the 2024 Lok Sabha election, the party had edged ahead of the TMC in this segment. Cabinet minister Dr Shashi Panja—a doctor-politician seeking a fourth consecutive term—faces first-time BJP candidate Poornima Chakraborty, whose nomination rally was addressed by Yogi Adityanath.

MANIKTALA: STAR POWER VS POLITICAL HEFT

Maniktala has one of the election’s more unusual matchups: the TMC has fielded television actress Shreya Pandey, daughter of the late minister Sadhan Pande and former MLA Supti Pandey, counting on a family legacy that delivered a 71.65% vote share in 2022. The BJP has responded with Tapas Roy, a figure well known across Kolkata North who narrowly lost the 2024 Lok Sabha election from this parliamentary constituency. Yogi Adityanath campaigned for Roy here too. CPI’s Mousumi Ghosh rounds out a three-cornered fight.

ENTALLY: MINORITY SEAT, MULTIPLE ANXIETIES

In Entally, the TMC’s Sandipan Saha faces the BJP’s Dr Priyanka Tibreal and the Left Front’s Abdul Rauf of CPI(M) in a constituency where a large Muslim population has been acutely affected by the SIR deletions—roughly 65% of the undecided deletions statewide were Muslim voters. The seat’s 236,126-strong electorate (2024 baseline) makes it one of the larger Kolkata constituencies by roll size, and the outcome here will depend heavily on whether minority anxieties around voter deletion and the CAA translate into consolidated anti-BJP voting or get fragmented across the opposition.

COSSIPORE-BELGACHHIA: INDUSTRIAL BELT, NARROWING MARGINS

In Cossipore-Belgachhia— home to the historic Cossipore Gun and Shell Factory and the northernmost urban constituency in Kolkata—the TMC’s veteran Atin Ghosh faces BJP’s Ritesh Tiwari and Left’s Rajendra Gupta. The 2021 TMC vote of 56.48% had already narrowed to a 45.55%–40.47% margin over the BJP by 2024. In a seat where working-class voters worry about industrial decline and job security, the opposition’s anti-incumbency argument finds real traction.

CONCLUSION

Taken together, the BJP’s Kolkata push in 2026 is the most coherent and wellresourced that it has ever attempted. The party has campaigned at senior levels—Narendra Modi, Amit Shah, Yogi Adityanath and Suvendu Adhikari have all made multiple appearances across the city’s constituencies—and has fielded credible, recognisable candidates from Bhabanipur to Jorasanko. Whether it can convert the cocktail of voter deletions, anti-incumbency, and Hindutva consolidation into actual seats inside India’s most politically distinctive city remains, as always, the Kolkata conundrum.