The West Bengal elections stands out for a rather rare kind of psychic affliction.It is a kind of a mental construct, a state of mind, totally impervious to anything that happens in the “real world”. And that is the thought, idea, or perhaps just a fixation of the mind, that West Bengal cannot go to the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), that BJP and West Bengal cannot go together.This thought is so powerful and so entrenched in a particular Bengali psyche that even if, come May 4, BJP were to actually win West Bengal, nothing would have changed! This thought will persist and live on, well protected by high impenetrable walls and a particular opacity of the mind. BJP might win the elections in West Bengal and form a government but it still does not get entry into the West Bengal of the Bengali’s dreams.The real world has no currency here. The ideal is more real than the “real”. With a BJP win, the Bengali way of life will perhaps continue as before, and yet it won’t be the same. The fish might be the same, and yet when dangled like that in “their” hands, in an electoral campaign, the vibe changes and the fish itself becomes a point of contention — no, now nothing can be the same. In psychoanalysis, such an ideal is called the Real. We can then say that the Real of Bengal seeks to override reality itself. The more reality is slipping out of hand, the more acutely is the Real felt and experienced. The gap widens, the dissonance sharpens causing tremendous anxiety and nervousness for the progressive bhadralok.Swapan Dasgupta, BJP’s foremost mind in West Bengal, recently wandered into this thicket. He was trying to assuage and contain such affronts that the Bengali was feeling. He said, look who would have imagined that Assam will go to the BJP? Would you have imagined the same about Orissa? But well, it has happened, right? So why should it be unthinkable when it comes to West Bengal.Clearly, though, the interlocutor was not convinced. In posing the question, Dasgupta merely highlighted the problem at hand. And that says a lot.Dasgupta went onto invoke Nirad C. Chaudhuri’s defence of the demolition of Babri Masjid and Margaret Thatcher’s drive towards free market fundamentalism, presenting the BJP as a historical force supposed to forever remake Bengali society, economy and culture.Also read: Bengal SIR: What the Patterns of Exclusion for Muslim, Scheduled Caste and Urban Voters SayHighly self-cocooned in the local, Bengali society seems impenetrable to the market driven spectacular bubbles and the accelerationism of capitalism – this, while consuming high-brow cultural artefacts from all over the world. And perhaps they are the last in India to open themselves to the seamless banality of viral, digital cultures. West Bengal’s intransigence is sought to be broken now by the forces that are ultimately connected to a particular kind of Oligarchic capital. Whether the cocoons are going to resist, play along or throw up unique forms remains to be seen, and could possibly be a social anthropologist’s delight.This dissonance is however not felt that acutely when it for example plays out in terms of a supposed congenital rivalry or enmity between the BJP and Trinamool Congress (TMC). The latest coming out of Falta in South 24 Parganas is the imagery of a battle between Singham and Pushpa. Some analysts expect many TMC MLAs to crossover if the BJP wins. Similar crossovers in the reverse direction is expected if the TMC wins.Or when some say that for the Left the best strategy is to first remove TMC by putting bets on the BJP. After that, it is not so difficult to dislodge BJP and come to power. This is the Ram-Bam tactic, first Ram and then Bam. So BJP here becomes merely another party in the game.All of this dilutes the BJP versus West Bengal narrative quite a bit. And yet the notion of an ideal West Bengal persists. A BJP win will activate it quite sharply. For it will play out as an attack on the very idea of West Bengal. Is this why some astute observers have predicted that the fall out of a BJP win would be rather grim and convulsive? Jawahar Sircar for one predicts such a grim scenario.Some dark forces might get unleashed. The “bohiragoto” (outsider) slogan against the BJP might take a divisive and sectarian turn. Till recently, it has been absorbed within the electoral field. Once the BJP wins, this will change. A good section of Bengalis might be on the edge and become a bit too sensitive to the “outsider”. A situation where things can flare up fast and take a different turn might take place.We have already seen the kind of “regional feelings” in Tamil Nadu and Maharashtra against “Hindi imperialism”. BJP’s Hindu vs. Muslim will be countered by the “outsider” narrative.Then there is the really unique political culture of West Bengal which the BJP will have to cope with.BJP is a party tied to big transnational capital and it takes decisions from the top, assuming that the people will just passively accept what is doled out. West Bengal however has a self-assured population. They are not easily impressed by the big movers and shakers. Also read: The Indian State Versus West Bengal: An Election Unlike Any OtherWest Bengal has a long established system which scholars call party-society. Party loyalty is the overriding identity on which livelihood and jobs are dependent. The local para (neighbourhood), the clubs, the puja committees are all tied to the ruling party and their henchmen. BJP in West Bengal might in course of time also turn out to be a liability for the highly centralised Modi coterie. Who knows West Bengal is waiting to be the nemesis of the “Gujarat model”.But once these parasitic and lumpenised intermediaries built by the Left and continued by the TMC are destroyed under the BJP, class contradictions might again sharpen in West Bengal, reminiscent of the 1960s and 70s. We know what happened then.Overall, it is also a time of historical reckoning for West Bengal and its highly closeted intellectual class. The state’s brush with the BJP can also be seen as part of something like a payback time. Ritwik Ghatak’s marvellous film Ajantrik (1958) which midway goes into a kind of a trance-like immersion in an adivasi festival or carnival, is a great work of art. But looking back, despite the great film maker’s efforts, this digressionary scene only seemed to reinforce the distance of even the most radical experiments from the “masses”. Ghatak penetrates the Real of Bengal and reveals an inner contradiction. That way, the BJP will only opportunistically capitalise on faultlines that have been identified before. What was Ghatak telling us through his film? Maybe it is still not too late to try listening to him. Meanwhile, the BJP does very well in the adivasi areas.Saroj Giri teaches Politics in University of Delhi and is part of the Forum Against Corporatisation and Militarisation (FACAM).