By T N Ashok
Let the record show that the fate of one of India’s most consequential state elections now rests, at least symbolically, on the humble rohu. Not on unemployment. Not on industrialization. Certainly not on the ₹75,000 crore in central government projects allegedly gathering dust in Mamata Banerjee’s in-tray. No — on fish.
Welcome to Bengal’s election season, where the campaign trail smells of politics, propaganda, and something frying in mustard oil.
With polling days of April 23 and 29 approaching like a deadline neither side is ready for, Prime Minister Narendra Modi and Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee have entered the campaign’s final stretch in the manner of two seasoned wrestlers who have simultaneously decided to argue about the buffet. The rhetoric is soaring. The accusations are flying. And somewhere in Kolkata’s teeming fish markets, a bewildered vendor is wondering why the most powerful politicians in the country are suddenly very, very interested in his inventory.
“In 15 years, they couldn’t even give you fish,” Modi thundered at a rally in Haldia, deploying the kind of line that sounds devastating until you try to parse it. The implication — that Bengal’s fish supply has somehow withered under Trinamool Congress governance — was delivered with the gravitas of a national security briefing. Modi, who leads a party that has occasionally found itself on the wrong side of India’s spectacularly contentious beef-versus-brisket debates, appeared to have discovered a new dietary solidarity. The man who presides over states where meat consumption has at various times been restricted, fined, and politically discouraged, was now, emphatically, the candidate of fish.
Banerjee, who did not get where she is today by letting anyone else season her arguments, was having absolutely none of it.
“Fish is available in every market,” she shot back at a rally in North 24 Parganas, with the air of someone explaining a self-evident truth to a particularly slow student. She then pivoted with the elegance of a seasoned campaigner to the larger point: “Diet is a matter of choice.” The subtext, barely coded, was that BJP-ruled states have a history of telling people what they may and may not put on their plates — and that Bengalis, historically unenthusiastic about being told anything by anyone, should consider this carefully before voting.
In the space of forty-eight hours, a campaign that had been fighting over development, law and order, and democratic legitimacy had cannily tunnelled into something far more visceral: the right to eat your dinner in peace.
This is not, it should be noted, entirely frivolous. Bengal’s maachh-bhaat — fish and rice — is not merely sustenance. It is a biography. It is the meal that defines the calendar, marks the festivals, and argues, loudly, that a Bengali is a Bengali is a Bengali regardless of what any political party might prefer. When the CPI-M was in its long-ruling heyday, the party reportedly sweetened its rallies by promising maachh-bhaat to workers who showed up in sufficient numbers. Even the Marxists knew: you could sell the workers on ideology, but you closed the deal with fish curry.
Modi, wading (pun intended) into this cultural water, is attempting something ambitious: to turn a symbol of Bengali identity against the very party that has long claimed to be its custodian. Whether it will work is another matter. The voters of Bengal have watched many clever outsiders arrive bearing gifts and slogans. They tend to listen politely, enjoy the spectacle, and then vote according to calculations that confound pollsters entirely.
But if fish is the campaign’s most photogenic controversy, the Special Intensive Revision — universally, ominously abbreviated to SIR — is its most explosive. Banerjee has alleged that more than 90 lakh names, that is to say nine million human beings who presumably existed last Tuesday, have been deleted from the electoral rolls. “A fight for the survival of Bengal,” she called it, and whatever one makes of the specific numbers, the charge carries the unmistakable electricity of a live wire dropped into a puddle.
The BJP has dismissed this as election-season melodrama. The Election Commission has promised an inquiry. Banerjee has promised to keep repeating the allegation at maximum volume until further notice.
The peculiar genius of the SIR controversy is that it transforms every voter into a potential victim. You don’t need to have been deleted — you only need to worry that you might have been. In a state where elections have, on previous occasions, featured the full carnival of democratic irregularities — booth capturing, intimidation, the occasional crude bomb — the suggestion that your name may have quietly disappeared from the list is precisely the kind of anxiety that does not require proof to be effective. Fear, in politics, is self-propagating.
So here is the battlefield as it stands: on one side, a Prime Minister arguing that fish supplies have declined and infiltrators are flourishing, while ₹75,000 crore of development sits stalled; on the other, a Chief Minister arguing that nine million voters have been ghost-deleted and that if you let these people govern, your hilsa is next.
The BJP’s closing argument is, broadly, a governance audit. The TMC’s closing argument is, broadly, an identity alarm. Both campaigns have converged, perhaps inevitably, on the most reliable fuel in democratic politics: fear. Fear of losing your culture. Fear of losing your vote. Fear of losing, not to put too fine a point on it, your fish.
Out in the actual fish markets of Kolkata, the reaction to all of this is the reaction of people who have watched many elections come and go with promises that dissolved like salt in water. “Fish is available,” one trader observed with the philosophical detachment of a man who has heard everything, “but prices matter more than politics.”He is, of course correct. He is almost being ignored.
For Modi, Bengal is the prize that has eluded the BJP’s eastern ambitions — a foothold that would cement the party’s claim to be truly national, truly dominant, truly everywhere. For Banerjee, it is existential in the most literal sense: a loss here is not a setback, it is an ending.
For the voters — nine million of whom may or may not still be on the rolls — it is simpler and harder than any of this: livelihoods, safety, and the quiet assurance that when they show up to cast their ballot, their name will be there.
Bengal goes to the polls in less than two weeks. The fish markets will stay open. The accusations will continue. And somewhere in the gap between the rally rhetoric and the voting booth, millions of Bengalis will make up their minds about what, precisely, this election is actually about.
It probably isn’t fish. Then again, in Bengal, it is never just what it seems. (IPA Service)
