For voters in West Bengal required to choose a winning side and therefore a losing side, neither of which is satisfactory, the best bet lies in applying the minimax strategy to determining how the competition can be made to work to their individual advantage.In Game Theory, the minimax strategy, of always minimising the maximum possible loss which can result from a choice that a player makes, seems to be the natural choice for aggrieved voters.The 2026 state assembly election will be bipolar. What constitutes the polarities in voter perception will determine the outcome. The BJP continues to nurse the hope that it will succeed in ousting Mamata Banerjee; she, on the other hand, is on edge.Unhappy with the Trinamool Congress for different and contradictory reasons that can be clubbed together as anti-incumbency, but equally disapproving of the Bharatiya Janata Party’s centralised narrative of communal polarisation based on aggressive Hindu majoritarianism and belligerent demonisation of Muslims, as “ghuspaithiyas,” illegal “infiltrators” and “Rohingya,” as well as a homogenising promise of a double-engine government, voters have to decide which is the lesser evil.Anti-incumbency is common to the TMC and the BJP. The TMC has been in power in Bengal for 15 years and the BJP has been in power at the Union for 12 years. Its political strategy is as familiar as the Trinamool Congress’s; the double engine model and the guarantees of sabka saath sabka vikas (with all, development for all) is well understood by Bengal’s voters. As politically conscious voters, who migrate out of the state, the political shenanigans in Maharashtra, where the BJP split Sharad Pawar’s Nationalist Congress Party and Uddhav Thackeray’s Shiv Sena are understood by Bengali voters.Both ends of the Bengali domestic diaspora, the educated employed and the low-skilled or unskilled workers engaged in daily wage labour and gig work, know what happens around the country. Therefore, the BJP is not the new and shining alternative that it seemed to be in the 2019 Lok Sabha election, when its vote share zoomed 40.6% and there was a wave of support for the energetic and charismatic Narendra Modi.In 2026, the BJP in West Bengal is almost as familiar as the Congress or the Trinamool Congress. Narendra Modi is also the leader who blundered badly by cat-calling Mamata Banerjee – “Didi, o Didi” – in 2021. The party and its leadership is known, therefore, when ex-state president Dilip Ghosh nominated this time from the Kharagpur Sadar seat warns that “she” will not get away with displaying bandages and plaster casts and she will be incapacitated by her injuries, no one in West Bengal makes the mistake of pretending not knowing who his target is.The promise of a flood of development after the BJP is elected, a double engine sarkar is installed and Banerjee ousted is a threat. Anti-establishment is how the Bengalis see themselves; from the time they decided that being compradors to the East India Company and British imperialism was a bad idea down to Mamata Banerjee, there is a shared pride in the history and its continuing practice of radicalism, of stepping out of line, trashing rigid conventions and relishing not being conservative. Netaji Subhas Chandra Bose battled Mahatma Gandhi when he became president of the Congress in 1938 in Haripura; Tagore argued with Gandhi over the difference between swadeshi and swadhinata and the idea of nation and nationalism. West Bengal’s first and iconic Congress chief minister B.C. Roy battled Jawaharlal Nehru, as Jyoti Basu battled Indira Gandhi, who served as chief minister for 23 uninterrupted years; the state hosted opposition conclaves to build pressure on altering the Centre-state power equation; the state confronted the then Planning Commission about being deprived, accusing it in its former finance minister Ashok Mitra’s terms of “step motherly” treatment. Therefore when the CPI(M) was in power, it called bandhs and now, Banerjee sits in dharnas, leads rallies through the streets and storms the Supreme Court to make her point about SIR and the Election Commission.West Bengal chief minister Mamata Banerjee reaches the Supreme Court premises, in New Delhi on February 4, 2026. Photo: PTI.The Centre versus West Bengal is part of the state’s political traditions and its history. The promise of a double engine sarkar where the state becomes subordinate to the Union government and follows directions is not an idea that excites Bengalis, especially not its educated middle class, comprising a wide spectrum from the almost poor to the very rich.But voters have a limited choice – the TMC is a party that has increased its vote share and support base, by hook or by crook, from 30.7% in 2001, when it emerged as the official challenger to the seemingly immovable reign of the Communist Party of India Marxist led Left Front. In 2021, Mamata Banerjee’s party had a vote share of 48.5% and its official challenger, the BJP had a vote share of 38. 5%, up from 4.1% in 2011. The vertiginous increase in BJP’s vote share is proportionate to the decline in the CPI(M)-Left Front vote share and less so for the Congress.Mamata Banerjee knows full well that after three terms in office, punctuated by scams involving abuse of power, money for jobs, all sorts of racketeering and one specific incident of rape and murder of a young doctor within the state government-run R.G. Kar Medical College and Hospital campus that provoked unprecedented outrage, popular discontent with her government was high. This degree of discontent was different in 2021; then voters delivered an unequivocal message that they were prepared to support a new political force, namely the BJP.Junior Doctors’ Forum members, senior doctors and others raise slogans during a torch rally from College Street to Shyambazar on the eve of first death anniversary of the rape-murder of a trainee doctor of RG Kar Medical College and Hospital, in Kolkata, West Bengal, Friday, Aug. 8, 2025. Photo: PTI.By 2024, Mamata Banerjee knew she was living dangerously, as unrest and disapproval spontaneously erupted and hit the streets by shocked men and women, including football fans who strung up banners during the Durand Cup play off between Mohun Bagan and East Bengal, after the R.G. Kar Medical College and Hospital rape-murder case. For weeks, there were spontaneously organised rallies by ordinary, albeit predominantly urban, educated and middle class, largely women voters. These rallies included people who voted for the TMC and against the BJP. What happened in R.G. Kar revealed the ugly underbelly of the Mamata Banerjee government. In public perception it confirmed every grievance that voters had nursed against the Mamata Banerjee regime and the large scale abuse of power, corruption and protection or patronage of such dark dealings.The response to the horrific rape and tragic murder was divided; urban, educated voters were angrier than rural voters. It was not that rural voters were not aghast about the incident. The working poor had a different reaction, because their lived realities were different; their daughters lacked access to the opportunities that the urban middle class had.The incident was an opportunity to drive a wedge between women voters and Mamata Banerjee but the BJP botched it. As a party, BJP’s playbook has no strategy to handle an issue like women’s rights and security in the work place, because its ideology only positions women and girls as potential wives and mothers, the docile who slave in kitchens and uphold whatever is prescribed as women’s role by Sanatan Dharma.Under the direction of its central leadership BJP veered off to chase out “guspaithiyas and Rohingya”; the migrant Bengali speaking worker, that is the domestic diaspora, became the target of BJP’s attention and physical attacks across the country. For reasons that are probably linked to its prejudices and obsessions, the BJP seems to believe that Bengali speakers who disperse across the country in search of work are Bangladeshis. The exodus that followed was a gift to Mamata Banerjee, who pounced on it to turn the political contest into a confrontation over language, identity and the idea of India as a nation that is plural, diverse and inclusive.From 2025, the BJP made one mistake after another by focusing its attack on identity and the need to “purify” the nation. The beta version of Special Intensive Revision that the Election Commission unveiled triggered wide spread anxiety, frustration and later anger in West Bengal. The SIR in West Bengal has confirmed what the voters already know; the BJP’s policy is as union home minister Amit Shah said in parliament – “detect, delete, deport”. By simplifying the identification of so-called “ghuspaithiyas” into two categories – those from Bangladesh who are Muslims are “infiltrators” and those who are Hindus are refugees. The BJP ignored the fact that lakhs of Hindus also arrived in India, after 1947 and then again after 1971 without travel documents and blended into the landscape to restart their lives.Because the SIR process split into the domain of citizenship and identity, it was one more gift to Mamata Banerjee and indeed the Congress and the CPI(M)-led Left, isolating the BJP as the only advocate of a process that threatened to disenfranchise and destroy the toe-hold of Hindus who crossed over illegally. The process affected the BJP’s support base among the schedule caste Matua community and among the indigenous ethnic community of Rajbangshis, the largest Scheduled Caste group in West Bengal.Also read: ‘Will Our Names Be Left Out?’: Rajbanshis in North Bengal Face SIR AnxietyBy silly generalisations about illegal migrants being Bangladeshi Muslims, about Bengali not being a language at all but a bunch of dialects imported from districts now in Bangladesh, by stirring up a controversy over Vande Mataram and pitting Rabindranath Tagore against Bankim Chandra, by calling the author of Vande Mataram, “Bankim da”, whereas he is usually referred to as Rishi Bankim Chandra, getting it wrong about the proper address for Shri Ramakrishna Paramahansa Dev, inadvertently altering Rabindranath’s name from Tagore to Sanyal, the BJP could not have done more to culturally alienate itself from Bengali voters.Voters in Bengal are not impressed by Modi’s small packages of transformational investment; a Rs 18,000 crore handout for roads, railways, ports and railway stations does not impress the working class, who know the difference between a trickle and a flood. Generations of workers and the stories that are retold have made West Bengal’s work force aware of where it was and to what lows it has now sunk as a manufacturing, trading, business leader among India’s states. Had Modi announced seriously large investments in the bits and pieces of the manufacturing industries remaining in the state, or if he had promised to stop moving out head offices of public sector undertakings from Kolkata, voters may have been more enthused.On the other hand, Mamata Banerjee may not be an angel but she does distribute crumbs via the direct cash transfer schemes including the iconic Lakshmir Bhandar and the newly-minted Yuva Sathi, a stipend for unemployed youth. In public perception there is a divide; one lot believes she can be forgiven for not increasing employment opportunities because she caters to the needs of the poor from the cradle to the grave, while the other lot believe the money she hands out could have been used for job creation.The 2026 state assembly election boils down to a Bengal versus the Union fight. One slogan sums it up – assault as you will, Bengal will triumph again – Jotoi koro hamla, abar jitbe Bangla. Instead of making it a Mamata versus Modi fight, the TMC has converged the person into the body of the people. Wary after attacking Banerjee personally and failing in 2021, Modi has chosen to target his attack on her double – the nirmam (cruel/brutal) government.Also read: Two Phases, Uneven Revisions: Behind Bengal’s 2026 Poll BattleThe campaign as it begins to gather momentum will be contest of which side deflects attention best; will Mamata Banerjee succeed in distracting attention from the long list of discontentments by raising emotions to the injustices perpetrated on Bengalis through SIR, the “Bangladeshi” branding that destabilises illegal Hindu immigrant-settlers, along with cultural and linguistic distortions, or will Modi succeed in bypassing these blunders and getting voters to focus on their grouses and grudges? Will she succeed in making the charge stick that the Election Commission, an agent of the BJP, is trying to impose an “undeclared emergency” in Bengal. Will the dramatic insertion of a new governor, R.N. Ravi, aid and abet the take over of the state apparatus despite a lame-duck elected government continuing in office?Voters will decide about which side they prefer. There are, however, a few facts that matter; over half of women voters have been loyal to Banerjee and an overwhelmingly large proportion of Muslims have preferred to vote for the TMC. Together these voters constitute a sizeable support base. The exact current size of BJP’s support base is uncertain. Both the Congress and the CPI(M) claim that their political prospects have improved, which could cut into either the TMC vote share or the BJP’s, though that will be confirmed only after the votes are counted.