With assembly elections announced, the Bengal battleground is gearing up for a high-powered electoral contest between the Trinamool Congress (TMC) and the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP). While the battle of electoral rolls has set the stage for the upcoming elections, the TMC’s main focus remains on Bengali regionalism. On July 21, 2025, the annual mega ‘martyrs’ day rally’, the TMC laid down the ruling party’s strategy for the 2026 assembly elections. The party supremo and the chief minister of the state, Mamata Banerjee, launched the ‘Bhasha Andolan (language movement)’ against the harassment of Bengali migrant workers in BJP-governed states and against the BJP’s ‘linguistic terrorism’. The party’s 2026 assembly election campaign song titled “Jotoi koro hamla, abar jitbe Bangla (attack as much as you can, Bengal will win again)” takes forward the sentiment by morphing Bengal into the TMC. Moreover, the TMC’s assertion, during the Dharmatala protest against the EC’s special intensive revision (SIR), that those who are not with the TMC are not Bengalis is a page out of their Bengali regionalism handbook.In the last few years, the TMC has used the regionalism trope to challenge its biggest rival, the BJP. From language to cultural icons, Hindu goddesses, Durga puja themes, the nominations of Rajya Sabha MPs, and now to food, the TMC shows how they are the sole custodians of Bengal and its people. In doing so, the TMC is not basing its regional assertion purely on Bengali ethnic or cultural sentiments. In fact, it is combining the state’s history and practice of economic regionalism and state autonomy with Bengali cultural symbols – using regionalism as a political category not only to counter the BJP but also to rebrand itself amid incumbency and an internal party crisis. CPI(M)’s fiscal regionalismTMC’s persistent opposition to the centre’s politics is not a new phenomenon. These practices date back to the 1980s, under the Left Front government, led by the CPI(M). As political science professor Shibashis Chatterjee argues, the state’s predominant regionalism was based on regional disparities and a sense of discrimination within the sub-region, which was a culmination of fiscal imbalance and an agnostic relationship between the central and sub-national state governments. He calls it economic or financial regionalism. Since Bengal belonged to a less developed group of states with historical and post-independence antecedents that reduced state capacity, it created a strong dependence on the Centre. However, unsatisfied with the centre’s engagement, the Left Front government translated this strong feeling of discrimination into economic regionalism against the Centre. Unlike the Left, the TMC is not bound by ideology. The Left’s commitment to the category of ‘class’ limited regionalism and regional assertion to questions about greater autonomy within the fiscal federal arrangement. The TMC, on the other hand, articulated regionalism as a political category while keeping the financial trope alive. TMC’s regionalism as a ‘political category’While Bengali regional enunciation has its roots in the TMC’s formation back in 1998, it gained significance after 2019, when the TMC constructed the BJP as “bohiragoto (outsiders).” In the follow-up of the 2021 assembly elections, the well-crafted slogan “Bangla nijer meyekei chae (Bengal wants its own daughter)” prominently sharpened Banerjee’s identity as embedded within Bengal’s regional distinctiveness. This invocation of cultural distinction is coupled with the state’s sub-regional positionality regarding the distribution of federal funds. The TMC has repeatedly highlighted the ‘injustice’ faced by the people of Bengal in terms of fiscal transfers from the centre. Its official website states that the state’s lump-sum investments in its efforts to address the centre’s defaults have put a burden on the state. It alleges that the centre’s refusal to release its share of the funds has led to a deficit of around two lakh crore across key schemes. The party raises questions on how the union government’s capital investment and fund allocation are tilted in favour of BJP-governed states. TMC adds another layer by invoking the state’s autonomy vis-à-vis the central agencies. The TMC dubs the activities of the central agencies as antithetical to the federal ethos. The functioning of the Enforcement Directorate, Central Bureau of Investigation, Income Tax department and the National Investigation Agency is portrayed as an assault on the state’s independent functioning. In fact, the TMC’s protest and institutional confrontation with the Election Commission over the SIR in the state is but an instance which can be cited as central agencies’ attack on regional autonomy. TMC’s regionalism is thus a three-level game. It combines the state’s predominant financial regionalism with cultural distinctiveness and the primacy of state sovereignty against the long arm of Delhi. This makes TMC’s practice of regionalism political and not identity-centric. It does not focus on the nativist idea of regional identities based on linguistic or cultural chauvinism. This way, the party is not creating the Bengali state as a distinct ‘ethnic’ category, but strictly as a ‘political’ category, whose categorisation is driven by two essential factors. BJP’s communal polarisation With the rise of the BJP, the era of communal polarisation has dawned on Bengal politics, and the TMC has constructed its regionalism to overcome the aggressive Hinduisation of identity. The instances of promoting worship of the Hindu god Ram by the BJP were portrayed by the TMC as regressive to the Bengali Hindu culture that is rooted in the practices of worshipping the Hindu goddess Kali and Durga. As a response, the party promoted slogans for ‘Jai Ma Kali’ and ‘Jai Ma Durga’ against the BJP’s ‘Bharat Mata Ki Jai’ and ‘Jai Shree Ram’. The distinct discourses show distinct brands of Hindu cultural promotion.Still, the TMC makes it clear that while the BJP’s Hinduism is rooted in a sectarian, north-Indian nationalism, their articulations are regionalist.TMC’s regionalism is also a product of prudent electoral calculation. While there were limits to the BJP’s religious polarisation in the preceding elections, the BJP’s rise has significantly divided the Hindu-majority vote between the BJP and the TMC. With reference to the voters’ opinion, a study by Maxime Vincint notes that Bengali identity triumphs over religious identities. To maximise voter support, the TMC presents the overarching Bengali regional identity as a response to the BJP’s nationalising tendencies and its communal polarisation. Against anti-incumbency and party crises Finally, TMC’s regionalism needs to be situated within the broader framework of party strategy and mobilisation. In recent years, the party has faced internal crises and a growing anti-incumbency sentiment, which sometimes go hand in hand. The Trinamool, a breakaway from the Congress that had been relatively popular among urban voters in its initial days, gained grassroots support after the Singur-Nandigram movement. Coupled with Banerjee’s street-style politics, the social movement gave the party the fuel to position itself ideologically against its opponent. At this moment, the party coinage of ‘ma, mati, manush’ – mother, soil and people – shaped the party’s image as the harbinger of ‘poriborton’ or change. Soon after coming to power, the party added a layer of ‘unnoyon’, or the welfare of the common man, and words like ‘development’, ‘unity’, ‘progress’, and ‘working for people’ came to represent the party’s brand. While the welfare clubbed with Banerjee’s populist politics remains relevant to this day, at a larger level, the current challenges of anti-incumbency, alleged corruption, unemployment, and law-and-order problems amid intensifying internal strife force the party to rebrand itself. The turn towards regionalism shows how parties modify strategies and party brands under pressure. We must situate TMC’s new regional movement within the context of internal anti-incumbency and party pressures, as well as external pressures from the BJP’s Hinduising and nationalising politics. It is in the intersection of these pressures that the party creates its distinct model of regionalism. Satyaki Barua is a PhD candidate at the University of Hyderabad.