Ping-Pong Populism: Bengal after the BJP

by Hindol Nandy

For the first time in the electoral history of the Indian state of West Bengal, the Hindu Right – that is, the RSS-BJP combined – has been voted into power, following its veritable victory in the 2026 Legislative Assembly elections. Although the legitimacy of this apparent victory is deeply questionable — after a visibly compromised Election Commission deployed the legal tool, named Special Intensive Revision (SIR), which literally put the names of nine million voters (12% of West Bengal’s entire electorate) ‘under erasure’ (Bhattacharya 2026) —it is nonetheless irreversible. West Bengal will, at least for the next five years, be ruled by a party who openly professes the concept of a solely Hindu India as their ultimate ideological goal.

While it has just been little more than three months that the BJP has captured power in Bengal, certain crucial political events have transpired that may allow us to provisionally comment on and definitively phrase the nature of the state’s ruling-class presently; and the theoretical phrase I choose is – ping-pong populism!

This seemingly playful phrase attempts to understand the defection drives or ‘political transfers’ of individuals/groups from one political party to another (and back, in some cases) and causally attach it to the phenomenon of populism. Partha Chatterjee, drawing from the writings of Ernesto Laclau, posits populism as a post-ideological political strategy which utilizes the prevailing elite-subaltern divide/s in the neo-liberal socio-economic order and seeks to channel it (apparently, in favor of ‘the people’) in a non-revolutionary direction. “Populist movements and parties create chains of equivalence through rhetorical, visual, performative, and other modes of representation of grievances. An empty signifier called “the people” is filled by a wide array of grievances, all signifying equivalent, unfulfilled, popular demands denied by the powerful elite that constitutes the enemy of the people” (Chatterjee 2020, 83). Yet, populism starts losing its lease of life when that strategy becomes institutionalized within everyday ruling structures and tries to pose as a coherent ideology in front of its followers. “This produces a sort of state populism in which the populist content becomes diluted and loses appeal” (Chatterjee 2020, 83).

In the context of West Bengal, populism, embodied in the very working structure of the Mamata Banerjee-led Trinamool Congress (TMC), has suffered this kind of dilution, almost instantaneously, after its defeat at the hands of the BJP this year, terminating the populist party’s fifteen-year-long rule in the state. This marks the end of a populist time in Bengal and potentially ushers in an impending fascist time. In the remaining part of this essay, I would try to argue, how, defections from the TMC to the ruling BJP gives the populist ethos (or should I say pathos?) a new lease of life and potentially deters/defers the Hindu Right’s fascist project from coming into practical fruition.

Ping-pong populists are not an idiosyncratic tide within the political grammar of populism, but form the very core of populist praxis. Defection as the norm (and not exception) of populist praxis can arguably be traced back to the shift of allegiance of prominent TMC leader Mukul Roy to the BJP in November 2017, “which paved the way for a steady exodus” (Chattopadhyay 2021) of individuals from the TMC to the BJP. In 2020, another TMC titan, Suvendu Adhikari (along with a host of other TMC members) defected to the BJP during Amit Shah’s (BJP heavy-weight and Union Home Minister) rally at Midnapore, West Bengal (The Times of India, 2020). This TMC-to-BJP political migration was reversed amidst the 2021 Legislative Assembly elections in West Bengal, when several BJP members (most of whom were organisational office-holders at the regional or local levels) ‘transferred’ themselves to the TMC citing their faith in Mamata Banerjee as the paramount reason for their defection, and the TMC welcomed them with open arms (The Times of India, 2021). Other prominent instances of BJP-to-TMC defection after the TMC’s humongous triumph in the 2021 state elections, are Babul Supriyo (two-time BJP MP from Asansol) [Singh 2021] and (quite poetically) Mukul Roy – the same person who had first inaugurated this TMC-to-BJP flow back in 2017 (Chattopadhyay 2021). “With his [Mukul Roy’s] return, a reverse exodus appears to be on the cards. A large number of grass-roots workers and local leaders who had joined the BJP before the [2021] election[s] are already returning to Trinamool, and many more are queuing up for readmission” (Chattopadhyay 2021).

At present, after the BJP’s ascent to power post-2026 elections, the ping-pong praxis of defection still prevails as a populist law, in the light of another round of TMC-to-BJP relocation (Chatterjee 2026; Bhattacharya 2026).

But unlike the TMC, the BJP is not a populist party. It has a crystal-clear ideological consciousness whose essence stems from a toxic culturalist notion which wants to transform India from a secular, pluri-cultural polity into a solely mono-religious (that is, Hindu) entity ruled by a fascist diktat. Hence, the BJP must ideally eschew the post-ideological phenomenon that is populism. It is also true that the Bengal BJP, after assuming power, did indeed try to ward off the populist pathos from its ranks when the state’s BJP president Samik Bhattacharya declared in June, that former TMC members/leaders would never be inducted into the BJP and the “trinamoolisation of [the] BJP would never happen” (The Times of India, 2026). Nevertheless, the Bengal BJP started retracting gradually from this sturdy vow of no-admission-to-TMC when the same Samik Bhattacharya, a few days later (much like Mahmood Mamdani’s postulation of good Muslim-bad Muslim [Mamdani 2002]) advanced his theory of good TMC-bad TMC “under which there would be no hesitation in taking along “bhalo” (good) TMC leaders” [emphasis mine] (Sharma 2026). Yet, this (poor) theoretical filter proved incapable of arresting the back-to-BJP trend that had gripped the TMC vanguards, and is in process till now. The remnants of Bengal’s populist pathos are plaguing the BJP’s rank-and-file so bad that the BJP was compelled to float a public helpline number in early August after recurring complaints regarding illegal toll exaction, cut-money transactions, syndicalism, etc. – the hallmark crimes that were associated with the previous regime - against members from its own echelons (Bhattacharya & Mitra 2026). It seems that the ping-pong populists are blatantly denying the BJP the clean break from populist pitfalls it so desired when it first took office in May.

Therefore, after the first three months of BJP rule in Bengal, when the state is undergoing a fuzzy political transformation, there are a few observations that need to be noted down – an exercise which I will devote myself to, in the succeeding, brief concluding section of this essay.

 

Populist Remainders in a Fascist Time

In the words of Partha Chatterjee, “To allow these [subaltern] populations to survive, [a populist] government must selectively extend benefits, suspend normal legal regulations, and treat these populations as exceptional cases – without, however, jeopardizing the structure of law and property that prevails in civil society” (Chatterjee 2020, 86). Therefore, populist governments advocate a liberal welfarism by redistributing its surplus wealth in such a manner that selective subaltern social groups are safeguarded against the worst forms of economic marginality to prevent the outbreak of full-fledged class warfare – and all this is executed within the bounds of bourgeois legality. This is the essence of the populist contract with its “people”. That being said, there is another kind of tacit contract which populism strikes with its potential leadership, a contract of power (in a deeply Foucauldian sense) whose terms are thus: I will keep leading the populist party as long as it stays in power!

The flip-side of this populist contract of power is simple, if the ruling populist party is ever ousted from state power, its leadership will abandon its role in the outvoted party and attempt to draw up a new contract of power with the party which has been newly voted in. This ‘contract of power’ thesis can serve as an apt causal tool to explain the phenomenon that is ping-pong populism.

The RSS-backed Bengal BJP, showed sufficient reluctance at the outset when the issue of ex-TMC inductions arose, as I have demonstrated above; but they couldn’t resist admitting ping-pong populists in their party because they thought that those very populists, who have been affiliated with the ruling apparatus of Bengal and its peculiar ‘party-society’ (Bhattacharyya 2016) for decades, will aid them in charting a convenient road for the Hindu fascists to command genuine hegemony over the populace of Bengal, and not be in possession of what Ranajit Guha posits as ‘dominance without hegemony’ (Guha 1997).

On another note, there is an ever-emerging friction between the ruling BJP wedded to a vision of an aggressive capitalist cleansing of urban spaces for its neo-liberal bosses on the one hand, and the urban poor of Bengal on the other hand. Massive protests broke out in June (just a month after the BJP swore in to power), against hawker-eviction drives orchestrated by the new government, with an aim to bulldoze and erase the urban poor from the cityscapes of the state. “Behind every demolished structure lies a larger story involving the daily struggle for survival, the source of food and income for lakhs of people, and what critics describe as the harsh realities of the ruling party’s broader economic policies” (Chatterjee 2026).

It is fully evident that even though the BJP has opened its doors to the ping-pong populists and have agreed to renew their ‘contract with power’, the other populist contract, the one that populism draws up with “the people” will not be abided by.

In conclusion, a series of questions hover as dark clouds over the newly crowned BJP in Bengal – will the remnants of populism, embodied by the BJP’s ex-TMC ping-pong cadres, continue to live a visible life among the ranks of the Hindu Right? If not, how does the BJP plan on converting these avowedly post-ideological populists to the Hindutva ideology? Can it be posited then, that remainders of populism are deterring/deferring the onslaught of a full-blown Hindu fascist time onto the political space of Bengal?

References

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Bhattacharya, Ravik and Mitra, Atri. 2026. “The Bengal irony: BJP cracks down on ‘TMC culture’ within its own ranks”. The Indian Express, August 9. https://indianexpress.com/article/political-pulse/at-bengal-helm-bjp-grapples-with-tmc-culture-cracks-down-on-325-workers-over-extortion-charges-10824265/.

Bhattacharya, Snigdhendu. 2026. “India’s Strongest Regional Party Collapses Thanks to Modi’s BJP”. The Diplomat, June 16. https://thediplomat.com/2026/06/indias-strongest-regional-party-collapses-thanks-to-modis-bjp/.

Bhattacharya, Snigdhendu. 2026. “Political turmoil in Indian border state as nine million lose voting rights”. BBC, April 12. https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cy51qg00dezo.

Chatterjee, Madhu Sudan. 2026. “As the BJP Government Bulldozes Bengal’s Hawkers, Resistance Sprouts From a Likely Quarter”. The Wire, June 5. https://thewire.in/rights/bengal-bjp-hawker-bulldozer-left-front-cpim-college-street.

Chatterjee, Partha. 2020. I am the People. New York: Columbia University Press.

Chatterjee, Tanmay. 2026. “3 ex-TMC MPs join BJP; to contest Rajya Sabha bypolls from seats they vacated”. Hindustan Times, July 9. https://www.hindustantimes.com/india-news/all-three-tmc-leaders-who-resigned-from-rajya-sabha-in-june-joins-bjp-101783612861072.html.

Chattopadhyay, Suhrid Sankar. 2021. “Defection: Reverse exodus in Bengal”. Frontline, July 5. https://frontline.thehindu.com/politics/bjp-tmc-defections-west-bengal-2021-politics/article34990296.ece.

Guha, Ranajit. 1997. Dominance without Hegemony. Harvard University Press.

Mamdani, Mahmood. 2002. “Good Muslim, Bad Muslim”. American Anthropologist, 104(3): 766-775. https://jan.ucc.nau.edu/sj6/mamdanigoodmuslimbadmuslim.pdf.

Sharma, Akhilesh. 2026. “’Good’ vs ‘Bad’ Trinamool: BJP’s ‘Strategy’ To Break Mamata Banerjee’s Party”. NDTV, July 10. https://www.ndtv.com/india-news/good-tmc-vs-bad-tmc-bjps-strategy-to-break-mamata-banerjee-party-11752465.

Singh, Shiv Sahay. 2021. “MP Babul Supriyo quits BJP, joins Trinamool”. The Hindu, September 19. https://www.thehindu.com/news/national/bjp-mp-babul-supriyo-joins-tmc/article36531909.ece.

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The Times of India. 2026. “West Bengal BJP shuts doors on TMC rebels, vows to prevent ‘Trinamoolisation’”, June 2. https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/india/west-bengal-bjp-shuts-doors-on-tmc-rebels-vows-to-prevent-trinamoolisation/articleshow/131459309.cms.