The Bharatiya Janata Party has had to wait for decades to grab power in West Bengal. The wait finally ended in May and work has now begun on war-footing to fit Bengal into the Sangh’s ideological and political mould.
After just two months in power, the Sangh brigade has already unleashed a blitzkrieg, offering Bengal a crash course to familiarise the people with the full fury of its communal agenda. The public-private partnership model of fascist terror with the state empowering and collaborating with vandal brigades on the ground is working overtime across the state. Meanwhile, the government is losing no time in unleashing its policy regime and setting the tone of its bulldozer-powered model of encounter raj.
Over the last decade, fascist rule in India has demonstrated three prominent features – mob lynching, bulldozer raj (‘bulldozer justice’, in official parlance) and targeted elimination dressed as ‘encounter deaths’. All three features are already being proudly flaunted by the new regime. The first incident of pelting of eggs at Trinamool Congress leader Abhishek Banerjee set a new trend early on and the dominant media of West Bengal, now completely aligned with the new regime, promptly normalised it as an expression of public anger against the TMC-era corruption. The media even coined a new term – ‘egg therapy’ – for this unmistakable symptom of a mob taking the law into its own hands.
Encounter raj
Encounter killings were adopted as a strategy by Amit Shah in Gujarat. One of these cases had even landed him in jail in a judicial era where the powerful still did not enjoy complete impunity. Subsequently Uttar Pradesh chief minister Adityanath incorporated encounter killings as a declared policy of governance along with bulldozing of houses, mosques, shops or other institutions belonging to members of the Muslim community. The BJP chief minister of West Bengal has turned this policy into a film dialogue of sorts “sakale jama, rate kharoch” – deliver to the police in the morning and kill by the nighttime. The first application of this policy has already been witnessed in case of the horrific rape and murder of an 11-year-old girl in the Baruipur area near Kolkata. The encounter victim, one Prabhas Mandal, was an eye witness of the original crime who had already named a few people, including a local BJP leader.
A policy of encounter killings can only mean a brazen negation of any notion of rule of law. It only helps the police become a rogue power and by no means has any deterrent effect on the rate of crimes. UP under Adityanath is witnessing on an average five encounters every day and yet the state continues to top the list of reported crimes against women. The Allahabad high court pointed out how the encounter raj was short-circuiting the criminal justice system and ordered mandatory FIR and investigation into each encounter, while exposing the partisan loyalties of the UP police.
Plethora of moves
Combine this arbitrary repressive mode of governance with the new policies and laws being set in motion. The government now has the power to detain anyone without trial for as long as one full year and such detainees will not even have the right to have any legal counsel to represent them. A uniform civil code bill aimed at obstructing, if not incriminating, interfaith marriages and live-in relationships, has been referred to a nine-member committee for further examination. Other Backward Classes reservation has been slashed drastically from 17% to 7%. All Scheduled Caste, Scheduled Tribes and OBC certificates issued since 2011 have been subjected to mandatory re-verification. Fifty-one state-run Industrial Training Institutes have been identified for privatisation. Eleven holding centres have been set up to corral suspected Bangladeshi citizens before pushing them back into Bangladesh. This ‘pushback’ is not what is called deportation in diplomatic terms, it is an illegal forcible act whereby people are pushed into Bangladesh territory across the border. The return of Sweety Bibi and five other Indian citizens including two minors who had been illegally banished to Bangladesh, after a yearlong legal battle, should serve as an eye-opener to the cruelty and injustice being meted out in the name of this ‘operation push back’.
True to the RSS agenda of ideological aggression, history and culture have already emerged as key battlegrounds for the new BJP government. A prominent road in one of Kolkata’s predominantly Muslim neighborhoods, known for nearly a century as Suhrawardy Avenue, after eminent physician and former Vice Chancellor of Calcutta University, Hassan Suhrawardy, has been renamed as Gopal Mukherjee Road after a person who has already been glorified as the saviour of Bengali Hindus in Vivek Agnihotri’s propaganda film The Bengal Files. Indeed the CM has announced a panel chaired by the controversial Kartik Maharaj to evaluate the names of Kolkata roads and replace ‘Mughal’ and ‘Pathan’ names. Kartik Maharaj, or Swami Pradiptananda of the Bharat Sevashram Sangha, was awarded Padmashri in 2025 even though he faces a rape allegation and is accused of instigating anti-Muslim violence.
Choice of tradition
Meanwhile, Syama Prasad Mookerjee has already been ordained as the father of West Bengal. June 20 has been designated as West Bengal day to mark the day when undivided Bengal was bifurcated as part of the overall partition of pre-independence India. Amidst these loaded attempts at redefining the history of West Bengal, came another ideological statement when the school midday meal project in Kolkata was handed over to Iskcon which promptly announced that eggs would be taken off the menu to uphold vegetarianism. Beyond the mid-day meal menu and the brazen undermining of children’s nutrition, the growing presence of Iskcon in West Bengal should also be seen in the wider cultural context of the state.
As the land of the great Bhakti movement icon Chaitanya Mahaprabhu, West Bengal has always had a strong Vaishnava tradition known as Gaudiya Vaishnavism. This 16th century tradition was carried forward in the 19th and early 20th centuries by Harichand Thakur (1812-1878) and his son Guruchand Thakur (1847-1937) in a strong anti-caste direction and consolidated as Matua religion. This was the period when Jotiba and Savitribai Phule were promoting mass education, especially education for women and the oppressed castes, as a weapon of empowerment and radical social awakening. From Chaitanya’s Gaudiya Vaishnavism to the Harichand-Guruchand school of Matua religion, the entire legacy is now being sought to be appropriated by Iskcon which operates as a powerful global ideological ally of RSS in its project of aggressive Hindutva.
The BJP wants to unleash its whole agenda without losing a moment. It believes the iron is still hot and must strike as hard as possible. Like Narendra Modi still keeping the public busy with Nehru and the Congress, the BJP in West Bengal would like to use Mamata Banerjee and the TMC as the distractionary veil behind which it can execute its gameplan undisturbed. The TMC has already been subjected to a threeway division. The rebel MLAs are being propped up as the ‘real TMC’ to rob Mamata Banerjee of her party, the majority Lok Sabha MPs of TMC are being held in the holding centre called the Nationalist Citizens Party of India, while three Rajya Sabha MPs have been converted and baptised straight into the BJP. Meanwhile, opposition on the ground from all quarters is being sought to be silenced by orchestrated mob violence and state intervention. It will be a mistake for the secular progressive opinion of West Bengal to treat the BJP as a passing phenomenon and its unfolding agenda as just some gimmick in the name of governance. The Sangh brigade is serious about turning West Bengal into another safe laboratory for its project of fascist remodelling of India. If the BJP is not wasting a moment, can the Left or any opposition worth its name be caught waiting?
(The article was first published in The Wire on July 14, 2026.)
