Living Under the Shadow of Violence
(Chapter 2)
The biggest achievement of the 2026 Assembly Election in West Bengal is not the voter turnout, not the SIR effect and certainly not the government it will usher into power. Though it appears the BJP is winning as discussed in Chapter 1. The single most achievement is that no person lost life. In violence ridden election in West Bengal, death had become normal. A few dozen people die in every elections. People suffer serious injures, women are raped, undressed and paraded naked in public.
The Flowing Tears
What is worst king of cruelty? One in which victim cries or the one in which a victim is not permitted to shed tears in public? Let me draw a picture.
A middle-aged women is standing, perhaps on the road near her house. A Police Officer is explaining to her, not to worry. He is accompanied by two tall women CAPF officers in blue anti riot police uniform. Women officer also try to assure the poor women by telling her that do not worry, we are here to protect you. Then something happened which camera did not capture as it was shooting from side view. Tears started to roll down the cheeks of women. One women officer came forward and wiped the tears with her own fingers with reassuring words. Woman stood still.
What the police force did not understand was that she was not crying out of fear. She was crying because not she could cry without fear of oppression. Under Mamata, crying was an act of rebellion. An act that challenged her undisputed leadership.
Crying in public was more dangerous to the narrative of Mamata’s benevolent rule than any opposition speech or BJP rally. Post poll violence was not about securing territory for the next election, though that was the practical justification. It was about restoring the emotional order.
Imagine if all those who suffered sit down on road with tears in eyes? It will be a statement of its own kind. It had to be stopped and was stopped by post poll violence.
Example of Violence
Numbers become real only when they have a face. Among the hundreds of documented cases of pre and post poll violence one stands out not for its scale but for its particular brutality.
On February 27, 2021, TMC workers allegedly entered the home of BJP worker Gopal Majumdar in Nimta, North 24 Parganas. They beat him with a revolver butt. His 85 year old mother Shova Majumdar was pushed, sustaining facial injuries. She died a month later on March 29, 2021. (See picture above)
TMC called it a family dispute. A fall. Prior health issues. The language of power when it cannot deny the body but must deny the responsibility.
Shova Majumdar was 85 years old. She had lived through Partition, through 34 years of Left rule, through the hope of 2011 and its subsequent betrayal. She did not survive long enough to see the election she was beaten for approaching.
This is what the Architecture of a Free Election was built to prevent. Not an abstraction called violence. This specific thing. An old woman pushed to the floor in her own home for the political beliefs of her son.
The Election Commission gave 85 year olds the right to vote from home in 2026. The timing is not coincidental. Someone remembered Shova Majumdar even if they did not name her.
The New Orwell
Orwell wrote about a government that controlled truth by controlling data. He called it the Memory Hole. What went in never came out. West Bengal under Mamata did not need a Ministry of Truth. It simply stopped submitting crime data to national agencies. The silence was the system.
But numbers have a way of surviving their suppressors. Between 2016 and 2019 political violence in West Bengal claimed 183 lives. Fatalities rose from 36 in 2016 to 96 by 2018. The Home Ministry documented it. The state government denied it. When the denial became unsustainable they stopped responding altogether. In Orwell’s Oceania that was called ‘Doublethink’. In Mamata’s Bengal it was called governance.
After every election the pattern repeated. Opposition workers’ houses torched in Hooghly and Howrah. Crude bombs in Burdwan. Families displaced from villages they had lived in for generations. The Election Commission noted it. The Union Government wrote letters.
West Bengal kept winning the wrong rankings. Highest human trafficking cases in India. Consistently among top four states for crimes against women. Thirty thousand such cases annually since 2018 with conviction rates that made registration itself a formality.
Orwell’s greatest insight was not that governments lie. It is that they make truth unspeakable. Under Mamata, the woman who could not cry in public was living inside that novel.
No wonder that Suvendu Adhikari, has in his press conference announced that CAPF will stay in West Bengal for 60 days after announcement of results on 4th May 2026.
People are free to cry for next 60 days.
In Chapter 3 we shall discuss the electoral reforms rather strict implementation by Election Commission of India.
References:
Political and post‑poll violence (2016–2024)
Election‑related violence analysis (data‑backed)
Crime‑against‑women and trafficking in West Bengal
Official‑style and NCRB‑related crime data