Kolkata: Sabina Yasmin does not start with politics. Over the phone from Nadia’s Kaliganj, she begins the chat with her daughter. “I am a mother first. Everyone calls me ‘Tamannar ma’ (Tamanna’s mother) I don’t know how to fight a political battle. I am fighting for my daughter and to ensure that no mother faces the same fate as I do, ever,” she says. Last year, Sabina’s nine-year-old daughter Tamanna was killed after Trinamool Congress supporters allegedly targeted the homes of supporters of the Communist Party of India (Marxist) in Molandi village following a by-poll victory. Now Yasmin is contesting as a CPI(M) candidate. Her daughter’s killers have not been brought to justice. “I cry every day. But my daughter gives me the strength,” Sabina says.Her story captures the central truth of West Bengal’s electoral violence. A day ago, a Congress worker, Debdeep Chatterjee, died in Asansol in an attack allegedly perpetrated by TMC workers, in a headline quite familiar during election in Bengal. Again and again, the dead are not ministers or district strongmen, but migrant workers, local cadre, daily wage earners and families with no money for prolonged legal battles. They are the poor. I strongly condemn the brutal and shocking murder of our Congress worker, Late Debdeep Chatterjee, in Asansol. This heinous act marks a dark and dangerous moment for democracy in West Bengal.Whilst the Election Commission of India claims that these elections are “free and… pic.twitter.com/U0NBt0TayG— Subhankar Sarkar শুভঙ্কর সরকার (@subhankar_cong) April 26, 2026Political power in West Bengal has long remained concentrated in the hands of middle-class, upper-caste Hindu leaders. Although rural marginalised communities and women gained representation, especially in local government bodies, real authority continued to rest with local elites such as schoolteachers, businessmen and upper-caste power brokers. The pattern repeats across West Bengal, from Cooch Behar in the north to Uttar Dinajpur and Murshidabad, down to Bhangar in South Bengal. Power remains concentrated at the top, while the violence is borne by those below.“Marginalised and minority communities largely supplied the foot soldiers to the political parties. Due to their economic and social vulnerabilities, they sought protection for survival from local political power offering loyalty in exchange for security,” explained political analyst Sambit Paul.In Kolkata, that burden has fallen on Biswajit Sarkar. On May 2, 2021, which was counting day for the assembly election, his brother Abhijit, a 35-year-old Bharatiya Janata Party worker, was dragged out of their home and killed in broad daylight, allegedly by TMC workers. In his FIR, Biswajit mentioned more than 30 men wrapped cable wires around Abhijit’s neck and smashed his head. He says he has been left to carry the case largely alone. “Family remains till the end, but parties are there to only do politics of corpses,” he says. The first year brought leaders, cameras and public mourning. After that, he says, the support faded. “Suvendu Adhikari stood by us in personal capacity. But not BJP’s Suvendu. It was the person. Not the party,” he says.At home, the family keeps a corner dedicated to Abhijit. The party, Biswajit says, has moved on.BJP national president J.P. Nadda with the family of Abhijit Sarkar in Beliaghata. Photo: BJP website.That a sense of abandonment runs through many such homes indicates that in today’s politics, victims matter only so long as they serve power. “As long as the victim is helping in acquiring power, they are important. Once done, across party lines, everyone conveniently forgets those victims and their families,” says Ranjit Sur, chief of the Association for Protection of Democratic Rights “This time Tamanna’s mother is contesting. I would say it is good that the party stood by them.”Sabina Yasmin’s candidacy, in that sense, is unusual. Not because grief has ended, but because it has been forced into the same arena that created it.In Bhangar, Fatima Biwi speaks from a different kind of ruin. Her son, Mohammad Mohiuddin Mollah, an Indian Secular Front candidate, was shot dead on June 15, 2023, when he went to file his Panchayat nomination at the Block Development Officer’s quarters. The politics around the case has shifted since then. Local TMC strongman Arabul Islam joined ISF earlier this year and is contesting from nearby Canning Purba constituency. Alliances have shifted, the accused have moved, and bail has been granted, but none of it has changed the reality of Biwi’s loss. “I know only one thing. I won’t ever get back my son. He has left me forever,” she says. “I don’t belong to any party. I am an illiterate mother who just knows how to love her children. I am still in tremendous shock and trauma.” Turf wars have long been a recurring feature of Bengal politics, and the first to die in them are often the party foot soldiers – usually men drawn into local political battles less by status than by the struggle for survival. The cost of that violence falls heaviest on people like Raushan Ali, a migrant worker from Lalgola, Murshidabad, who was killed on Panchayat poll day in 2023. Raushan was not a senior political figure. He was a man who, according to his brother Abul Bashar, stepped into a chaotic scene unfolding a polling station at Moya Chhatiani Primary School only to try and “calm the situation.”“He stepped in to calm the situation. It was then that he was attacked. He was beaten to death by Trinamool-backed miscreants,” Bashar says. In Bhangar, another CPI(M) worker, Ghiyasuddin Mollah, says he was attacked not after voting, but before he could even enter the race. “During Panchayat election nominations in 2023, I was attacked by TMC. My papers were snatched by them and I was beaten and severely injured and lost my sense,” he says. “Actually, they wanted to kill me.” Ghiyasunddin was attacked again during the 2024 Lok Sabha elections and escaped somehow. These are the quieter mechanics of Bengal’s poll violence. Not just punishment after results, but fear deployed at the nomination stage, at the booth, on the road to the booth, and then outside the courtroom when the survivors try to continue.Victims and perpetratorPolitical anthropologist Suman Nath traces this cycle to a mix of economic precarity, political dependence and Bengal’s long legacy of violence and counter-violence. For many among the weaker sections, attachment to a party is not simply ideological but bound up with survival, which is why they are so often drawn into the frontlines of conflict. In that world, Nath says, “The boundaries between between victim and perpetrator is almost always blurred. A perpetrator often becomes victim and if you see from an aerial view then everyone is a victim. The dependence on regime or particular political party is intense among the weaker sections, therefore it is often the only choice.”Bengal’s long history of violence and counter-violence has hardened into a cycle that reproduces itself most brutally among those with the highest stakes and the least social and legal protection. Marginal groups are the most exposed in the state’s “political society,” where power is often negotiated through influence, intimidation and street presence rather than formal institutions. So even when they are the ones carrying “crude bombs or sticks,” they often lack the legal and social capital to protect themselves from the fallout, ending up as both participants in and casualties of the same violent system.Nath says:“It’s a tragic cycle where the most vulnerable are incentivised to be the most violent, only to pay the highest price for it.”Even the counting of the dead is contested. RTI activist Biswanath Goswami claims that a police district-wise case study recorded 1,017 incidents of political violence and 60 political murders in 2021, while the West Bengal government reported only 34 incidents of political violence and seven political murders to the NCRB that year.Visualisation: Aparna Bhattacharya.“Bengal has a long history of political violence, but under the TMC, it has effectively become state-sponsored, with sections of the administration and police compromised by corruption. Marginalised Muslim communities often bear the brunt, while political clashes are quickly given a communal colour,” Goswami alleges. “Crime statistics are suppressed through ‘data rationalisation’ so that the violence people experience never fully appears in official records.”That is what links Sabina Yasmin to Biswajit Sarkar, Fatima Biwi to Abul Bashar, and the dead to those who survived. West Bengal’s poll violence is spoken of in the language of party rivalry, strategy and revenge. But in the homes, it leaves behind, it is a story of loss and little more.