Mamata's troubles are of her own making, but even if she loses, West Bengal can't be easily fixed

The Supreme Court bench hearing the West Bengal government’s petition against the Election Commission’s Special Intensive Revision (SIR) of the voters’ list made a simple observation: “Whether the state is governed by A, B or C political party… Other than West Bengal, the SIR in every other state has happened smoothly. By and large, there is hardly any litigation.”

This observation of the Chief Justice, who heads the bench, will not impact the final outcome of the West Bengal petition, where judicial officers are overseeing the SIR appeals process at a time when the election process is already underway. But it squarely seeks to throw the spotlight on how the state itself may have brought the SIR troubles on itself.

The problem leads us back to the Chief Minister herself, who takes every decision that does not have her approval as a personal affront. She wades directly into any confrontation, as she did when she entered the IPAC (Indian Political Action Committee) offices just when the enforcement directorate (ED) was raiding it in connection with an alleged offence of money laundering. Once again, another Supreme Court bench, this time with Justices Prashant Kumar Mishra and NV Anjaria on it, asked: “What if tomorrow some other Chief Minister barges into such a raid? Can the ED be left without remedy?” The bench was hearing the ED’s petition against Mamata Banerjee and her government’s actions during the raid.

In January, Mamata Banerjee claimed that three to four people involved with the SIR exercise were dying daily because of anxieties over the exercise. The question is who has created this anxiety? The EC faced no such anxieties in other states which too participated in the SIR exercise; it was only in West Bengal, where the Chief Minister has directly or indirectly threatened state officials involved in the SIR exercise. In a complaint filed before the Supreme Court, the Election Commission said that not only did it not get support from the local police, but the Chief Minister herself was part of the political intimidation process. It had this to tell the court:

“In continuation of the aforementioned conduct, the Hon’ble Chief Minister, on 14.01.2026 conducted a press conference in which she is reported to have engaged in fear-mongering, disseminated misleading and erroneous information regarding the SIR process, overtly threatened and targeted election officials, and sought to incite alarm amongst the electorate. It is also reported that the Hon’ble Chief Minister, during her reported speech, explicitly identified and targeted a micro observer, Shri Hari Das, thereby publicly isolating an election official performing statutory duties and subjecting him to unwarranted pressure and intimidation.”’

Is it any surprise that some officers involved in the SIR exercise are stressed out, when it is the state administration itself that is the primary cause of this tension?

By repeatedly confronting everyone who comes in her way, even if they happen to be constitutional bodies like the Election Commission or crime-fighting agencies like the ED, Mamata Banerjee has shown that for her everything is personal. Her aggressive Pavlovian response to anyone thwarting her wishes suggests that she has reduced the office of Chief Minister, and her compromised administration, to a personal fiefdom.

West Bengal would be better off seeing her back.

But, and it’s a big but, whoever succeeds Mamata, whichever party wins the current election or a future one, will be left to deal with her legacy. The problem in Bengal is that three decades of Left rule, when the state administration was converted into an extension of the Left Front parties, have been followed not by reform of the police and the administration, but a wholesale shift of the already compromised administration from party dominance to personal dominance. The private enforcers who were part of the Left simply became Trinamool enforcers, but with one crucial difference: this time as Mamata Didi’s own force. The police usually toe the line of these party-affiliated local enforcers.

This is not to suggest that in any other state the police and administration are not a bit vulnerable to political pressure and amenable to do what the executive requires them to do, but in West Bengal the subversion of the administrative apparatus has gone to one level of extreme where they are incapable of enforcing the law autonomously. 

If the BJP does win in 2026, it should ask for central support to totally revamp the police and top level bureaucracy. If it takes the easier route of just converting the current “tolamul” structure to serve the BJP’s political ends - as Didi did after 2011 - it would be a tragedy from which Bengal will never recover. Just under half a century (from 1977 to 2026) of political subversion of the state will put West Bengal beyond the pale of normal governance for a long time.