Aditya Nigam*
* Aditya Nigam, formerly professor at the Centre for the Study of Developing Societies, is a political theorist based in Delhi.
Enabling Fascist Takeover
In their analysis of Suvendu Adhikari’s campaign speeches in The Wire, Kunal Purohit and Aashna Ajmera wrote that days before Nandigram went to polls, in April 2026, Adhikari made a speech in the constituency, where he singled out Muslims for open attacks. Citing from a story in The Times of India, they report that the state’s chief minister-to-be warned the Muslims saying: “Don’t make a mistake! Mend your ways… so that there are no problems after May 4 (the day of counting). You can give threatening looks and say ‘Joy Bangla’, but I am writing down everything”.[1] Adhikari’s threat was simple – that there are 30,000 Muslims from Nandigram working in BJP-ruled states across the country and they had better watch out if they don’t fall in line.
Purohit and Ajmera go on to observe that Adhikari’s public rhetoric, since he joined the BJP after quitting the Trinamool Congress (TMC) in December 2020, “shows a systematic pattern of targeting the state’s Muslim population – inciting hate against them, peddling conspiracy theories and advocating their social boycott.”
Leaving nothing to the imagination, at a protest at the Bangladesh High Commission in the end of December 2025, Adhikari had told reporters that “(A) lesson must be taught. Like Israel did in Gaza, India’s 100 crore Hindus…the government is working towards the welfare of Hindus. A lesson must be taught like India did to Pakistan during Operation Sindoor,”.[2] The sentence was somewhat garbled but his point was clear.
All this, very simply, qualifies as genocide-talk. Any half-way democratic party or organization ought to have been able to see what was coming. In the first quote from Adhikari’s Nandigram speech it was also clear that he was certain about the outcome of the elections – hence the threat about “problems after May 4.” Overall, in all his speeches, he left no doubt about his genocidal intent and the last quote where he explicitly holds up Gaza as the example of what 100 crore Hindus must do to the Muslims of the state was the most explicit declaration of what was coming.
However, the West Bengal CPI(M), blinded by its pathological hatred for Mamata Banerjee and the Trinamool Congress could see nothing but a woman clad in a blue-bordered white sari wearing hawai chappals, who had defeated them in 2011. It kept up its relentless fire on the TMC as the real villain and in a way, continuously directed attention away from the threat that was looming large. In fact, in retrospect it is clear that Adhikari’s indication in the Nandigram speech that there would be a change of power after 4 May 2026, signaled that he already knew the plan. The state CPI(M) did what in military terminology would be described as “feint in the East, attack in the West” by keeping the focus on so-called “TMC terror”, while Amit Shah’s (and Gyanesh Kumar’s) forces took over the state. The CPI(M) cannot really pretend today that they did not know or could not see what was coming. They did and colluded in it – that is the inescapable logical conclusion. It also explains why the CPI(M) initially took a stance that virtually justified the so-called SIR (Special Intensive Revision) undertaken by the Gyanesh Kumar Commission.
Thus, it was only one more additional bit of evidence of the fascism-enabling politics of the CPI(M) that, on 4 May 2026, even as serious allegations regarding the counting process in many constituencies across the state were coming in, Suvendu Adhikari thanked the CPI(M) for helping him defeat Mamata Banerjee. “The CPM had 13,000 votes in Bhabanipur, and at least 10,000 of them were transferred to me. I also express gratitude to the CPI(M) voters there,” he told media persons.[3]
This transfer of votes that Adhikari talked of was aside from the large segment that had already deserted the CPI(M) and gone over to the BJP. The tendency among CPI(M) voters to shift en masse to the BJP was first noted by journalists during the 2018 panchayat elections though many people in the state seemed to have identified this tendency right from 2016 onwards. Thereafter, it became firmed up during the 2021 Assembly election, when the slogan being spoken in campaign murmurs by the party, was “ekushe Ram, chhabbishe Baam” (Ram in 2021, Left in 2026).
So let us be very clear that the CPI(M) was not just garnering votes for the BJP, it was also making sure that this genocide-peddler Adhikari would win and be the new Chief Minister of the state, by defeating Mamata Banerjee personally.
Now, as it happens, the BJP did not win the 2026 elections – it captured the state by destroying democracy. It was evident from the very outset that the party would stop at nothing. The fraudulent “SIR” which involved the deletions of 90.82 lakh voters from the state’s voters’ list, was carried out with no transparency whatsoever.
Eventually, the public were told that of these 58.18 lakh voters were struck off as “Absent, Shifted, Dead or Duplicate”. The remainder of around 27.16 lakh voters were removed following a supposed “judicial review” of “Under Adjudication” cases. The whole exercise was utterly opaque, with even the reasons for deletion not being provided by the Election Commission of India (ECI). This precise strategy had been carried out in Bihar earlier, where 65 lakh names had been deleted without explaining reasons and had been challenged in the Supreme Court by the Association for Democratic Reforms.[4] In West Bengal the deletions were equally opaque but it is clear that they targeted Muslim majority constituencies, Dalits and women – all known to be largely TMC voters. The process was carried out in suspicious haste, putting the entire population of the state through immense stress and humiliation, leading to many deaths.
But it wasn’t only the deletions. Suddenly on 18 April 2026, the ECI added 5 lakh names to the voters’ list after the conclusion of the SIR process and publication of the final list on 28 February 2026. No constituency level details were provided. “Neither a demographic breakdown by age or gender nor a count of first-time electors among the new additions has been placed in the public domain” and what is more, “the Supreme Court on 20 April 2026 declined to hear an oral petition challenging these Form 6 additions made after the SIR was formally concluded.”[5]
We need to recall here that such addition of lakhs of fake/ghost voters, exposed by Rahul Gandhi in his two press conferences in September and December 2025, had been critical in ensuring the electoral victory of the BJP in Haryana, Maharashtra and Bihar – and though such additions had been made in Karnataka as well, they could not decisively affect the outcome in the state as a whole.
Let me cite another recent statistical analysis regarding what it has to say about the Bhabanipur assembly constituency in particular where Suvendu Adhikari contested Mamata Banerjee. Here, the number of electors shrank from 2,05,553 in the 2024 general election to 1,60,313 in the final post-SIR roll before the 2026 election – a roll shrinkage of 22%. “The BJP received 35.2% of the vote in 2021 and the Trinamool received 57.7%, giving the BJP a margin of −22.5 percentage points. In 2026, the BJP received 53.0% and the Trinamool received 42.2%, a margin of +10.8 points. The constituency thus moved 33.3 percentage points toward the BJP relative to the Trinamool.”[6] This also indicates what the authors of the statistical analysis avoid saying – that BJP could only have wiped out its initial 22.5 percent deficit and added another 10.8 percent 2026, if the deletions were targeted and not random.
What was clear even to the naked eye and is now substantiated by these detailed mathematical analyses was apparently not visible to the state CPI(M) leadership. Does that seem even remotely plausible?
But the story does not end there. As we all know, as the SIR process came to a formal end, the former Tamil Nadu governor, RN Ravi, the Centre’s trusted man, known for his obstructionist role vis-à-vis the TN government, was appointed the governor of West Bengal. Thereafter, the entire electoral process was taken away from the hands of the state’s officials and the centre’s trusted officials were brought in from outside the state to conduct and oversee the entire election process. But even that wasn’t enough. 2400 companies of the Central Armed Police Forces (CAPF), numbering 2.4 lakh personnel were brought in, along with armoured cars, and it was announced that they would remain in the state for two months after the elections as well. A notorious encounter cop from Uttar Pradesh was also brought in for obvious reasons who is reported to have intimidated TMC candidates. In other words, it wasn’t just going to be an everyday election in a democratic state. It was going to be a forcible fascist takeover of the state with the full deployment of its repressive machinery of the state that was on display.
What did the state CPI(M) leadership think was going to happen? It is difficult to escape the conclusion that they knew what was going to happen and were in cahouts with the fascists. Not for nothing did the genocide peddler graciously thank them. And now that everything is over and the people of the state are paying the price for the entry of the bulldozer regime and its vigilante politics, the CPI(M) and its trolls are still celebrating the dismantling of the TMC by Amit Shah. They are still playing their assigned role of diverting any attention from the fact that it is democracy, the Muslims and the poor people of the state who have been looted. Of course, in the face of bulldozers demolishing poor people’s shops and hawker markets, they have also been seen resisting them but they hardly have any option, given that they have invited the new regime.
Any wonder then, that after 4000 EVMs got destroyed in a mysterious fire in a government office in Alipore taking with them precious evidence of the heist that was conducted under the watch of Amit Shah and the Gyanesh Kumar Commission, the CPI(M) has maintained silence?. They have nothing to say about this open destruction of evidence that was supposed to have been under the EC’s safe custody. In fact despite getting just above 4 percent of the total votes polled, this party has been behaving like victors – it is as if they have won the “elections”.
The Perversity is Political
It is necessary to recall and place on record that at least some of the top leaders of the party like the former general secretary, the late Sitaram Yechury, former Tripura chief minister Manik Sarkar and politburo member Hannan Mollah, had at different points either accepted or warned against the disastrous possibility of CPI(M) voters voting for the BJP.. However, for obvious reasons, they presented it only as an initiative of ordinary CPI(M) voters. Unfortunately, this stance does not tell the whole truth. To shift the entire blame of this huge swing solely on the Left’s support base and not the Party is dishonest. Take the instance of this message that had been circulating in the party’s WhatsApp groups in some districts. It is a long message of which I only cite the opening lines: “If the Bharatiya Janata Party comes to power in 2026, possibilities will open up for the Left Front’s return to power in 2031. Keeping this reality in mind I am requesting the lower-level activists, please do not waste your vote. Vote against the Trinamool Congress.” The message thereafter goes on to explain that this is politics, where there are no permanent enemies or friends. “Remember, your ideological opposition to the BJP has always been there and will remain in future as well,” it said as well.
The substance of this message corresponds very closely to the stance taken by the state party leadership, especially in identifying the TMC as the main enemy that needs to be defeated at all costs, even if that meant BJP’s accession to power. The massive social media debates around the supposed “equivalence” of the two forces and the CPI(M) warriors’ mocking of any suggestion that the TMC could be a lesser evil, was clear evidence of that position.
One can have no quarrel with the identification of the TMC as the Left’s main adversary in the state, especially since the former dislodged the latter from power in 2011. But the strange thing is that this particular discourse has continued unabated from 2011 – a time when there was no BJP threat on the horizon, till well after 2016 – when the designs of a transformed, virulent fascist BJP on West Bengal became absolutely clear. The Left’s position on who the chief enemy is did not shift focus.
Anyone who has been observing West Bengal knows that since 2014, and more aggressively after 2016, the BJP/RSS in West Bengal have increasingly organized Ram Navami rallies where participants, including children, with swords and tridents, violently raise slogans exhorting Hindus to unite against “jihadis”.
It had also become clear, at least since, the enactment of the Citizenship Amendment Act 2019, that at the political level, the BJP/RSS project has been to turn Muslims into second class citizens. As in the rest of India, it intends to strip bona fide Muslim citizens of their citizenship, labelling them Rohingya and Bangladeshi ghuspethiya (infiltrator). From the RSS/BJP point view, West Bengal has the great advantage of having undergone partition, where the terror of partition violence can be very easily stoked to serve the purpose of RSS’s violently divisive politics. Given that it shares a post-partition border with Bangladesh, it also becomes a perfect stage for the continuous enactment of its politics of hate.
None of this changed the West Bengal CPI(M)’s perception of either the BJP or the TMC and what its implications could be for its electoral-political strategy. If anything, the slogans, ekushe Ram, chhabbishe Baam in 2021 and ebar Ram, pore Baam during the 2026 elections indicate, they saw the emergence of the BJP as a godsend that will help them liberate their offices from TMC control. Thus, even after it became clear that the BJP wanted to drastically change Bengali life – their diet, their deities, even their language, the Left’s hope of BJP delivering them from “TMC terror” continued undiminished.
The one and only aim behind this perversity, it seems, was to take revenge on the TMC for dislodging the state CPI(M) from power, by returning the favour. The fact that it was dislodged from power by a woman, a “colony girl” is something the elite patriarchy of the party has never been able to come to terms with. It is patently clear now that what happens to the state, its Muslim minorities, its language and its culture matters little to them. They have finally taken their revenge!
The statement of the state secretary Mohammad Salim, immediately after the “results” were declared, whitewashed Amit Shah’s daylight heist, dressing it up as a fair election, with the observation that “the results of the West Bengal Legislative Assembly elections make it clear that the people have voted against Trinamool’s boundless corruption and authoritarian rule. The people of the state wanted the fall of the Trinamool Congress government. BJP has taken advantage of this anger.” Remember, this was being said by a party that polled just over 4 percent votes about a party that despite the daylight robbery, polled 41 percent. The complete forcible takeover of the state and democracy itself by the various factors that came together like collusion of ECI, fear of paramilitary forces, SIR deletions, and EVM scam was completely ignored by CPIM.
The TMC Question – Beyond CPI(M) Bluff
In the CPI(M)’s discourse, anyone who even remotely suggested that the BJP was the major threat to democracy and minority rights, was automatically and irredeemably a Mamata Banerjee crony. Most often the terms of abuse were openly misogynist and classist but let that not be repeated here, as many have pointed this out at different points of time and I myself have written about it.
Two points however, need to be made here. First, nobody thinks – and certainly not I – that TMC is some kind of “pure” party of anti-fascist resistance. It is not possible to repeat my larger argument here but let me just say, in summary for, that (i) the rise of fascist politics, in India as everywhere else, is directly related to the crisis of traditional parties. They have all contributed to the overall crisis of the polity and no party is exempt from it. To a very large extent, this part of my argument draws on insights from Gramsci’s writings based on his reading of the Italian situation. (ii) On an even larger canvas, the very “form” of the party – the party-form – today lies at the root of the destruction of democracies globally. This has to do, among other things, with the fact that in their pursuit of power which becomes their only reason for existence, they not only enter in to political alliances with forces antithetical to democracy but also form part of hidden caucuses that are out to destroy democracy. This part of my argument, of course, diverges from Gramsci’s but is based on my own study of politics and mass movements of the twenty-first century. So, anything that I say and write about struggle against fascist and right-wing politics today is situated at a completely different level which it is difficult to expect CPI(M) trolls to understand. My position on the TMC or AAP or the Congress or SP for that matter is based on the recognition that despite their severe limitations, they are the only instruments we have today in order to electorally channelize our combined forces.
Second, if we go by the history of different parties and the way they have partnered with the BJP at different points of time, we will be left with very little with which to fight the fascist menace. Parties like the DMK, AIADMK, Biju Janata Dal, JD (U), Samata Dal, TDP and BSP among others, had all been part of the National Democratic Alliance (NDA) during Atal Behari Vajpayee’s time. This is connected to the larger point I made above. Since most of these parties had come into existence by breaking away from the Congress, they found it to be their main adversary. It must also be remembered that since 1996, the overall game in Indian politics had changed and regional parties had become important players in national politics. In that situation, they had to enter the rival alliance in order to survive. It is both opportunism as well as survival strategy. This became a big existential question for many regional parties once the Congress withdrew support to the non-BJP United Front government in 1997, leading to elections in 1998.
The TMC too is guilty of entering into this kind of a tie-up by joining the NDA. In the 1998 and 1999 parliamentary elections, Mamata Banerjee’s TMC became a part of the Atal Behari Vajpayee-led NDA government. This alliance broke in 2001 but was then repaired and Mamata returned to the NDA for some more years. The key issue was that in West Bengal, she was fighting the virtually invincible machine of the CPI(M), which emerged as a key player in the first United Progressive Alliance government (2004), forcing her once again to go back to the NDA. The dynamic is pretty much the same as in the case of other NDA regional partners.
One can of course, be judgemental about Mamata Banerjee’s stance but then that yardstick ought to be applied uniformly for all parties in that category – which is the surest way of losing the struggle against fascism, as we have been so far. Indeed, contrary to the CPI (M) stance, the experience of the international communist movement points to the need to win over more and more allies, in order to isolate the main enemy. This is certainly the lesson of the struggle against fascism; it is also the running thread of Mao Zedong’s writings on the Chinese revolution.
[1] Kunal Purohit and Aashna Ajmera, Threats, Social Boycotts, Backing Violence: How Suvendu Adhikari Ran an Anti-Muslim Campaign to Win Bengal, The Wire, 12 May 2026, https://thewire.in/communalism/suvendu-adhikari-anti-muslim-rhetoric
Dwaipayan Ghosh and Suman Mandal, ‘Don’t Forget You Work in BJP States’: Suvendu Adhikari’s Warning in Bengal, The Times of India, 14 April 2026, https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/india/dont-forget-you-work-in-bjp-states-suvendu-adhikaris-warning-in-bengal/articleshow/130248741.cms
[2] BJP’s Suvendu Adhikari Draws Flak After Calling for Gaza-Like ‘Lesson’ at Protest Against Dipu Das’s Murder, The Wire, 28 December 2025, https://thewire.in/communalism/bjp-suvendu-adhikari-bangladesh-dipu-das-lynching-lesson-like-gaza . The sentence tapers of after “100 crore Hindus” but the point is very clear.
[3] Sanjay Basak, Suvendu Adhikari Thanks CPM for Vote Transfer as “Aage Ram, Pore Bam” Ghost Returns to Bengal, Deccan Chronicle, 5 May 2026, https://www.deccanchronicle.com/nation/suvendu-adhikari-thanks-cpm-for-vote-transfer-as-aage-ram-pore-bam-ghost-returns-to-bengal-1954841
[4] Rimjhim Singh, ECI Hid Reasons for Deleting 6.5 Million Voters in Bihar Draft Roll: ADR to SC, Business Standard, 6 August 2025, https://www.business-standard.com/elections/bihar-elections/eci-voter-deletion-bihar-draft-roll-adr-supreme-court-electoral-data-125080601267_1.html
[5] For a detailed arithmetic analysis, see Subhashish Dey, How the Invisible Maths of Electoral Roll Revision Altered West Bengal’s Election, The India Forum, 12 June 2026, https://www.theindiaforum.in/politics/how-invisible-maths-electoral-roll-revision-altered-west-bengals-election . The citations and information in this and the previous paragraph, except for the Bihar deletions, are based on this article.
[6] Bhanu Joshi and Nilanjan Sircar, Data Analysis: How SIR Deletions Shaped BJP’s Landslide in Bengal, Scroll.in, 16 June 2026, https://scroll.in/article/1093602/data-analysis-how-sir-deletions-shaped-bjps-landslide-in-bengal
Picture by Partha Chakraborty