Corruption and law-and-order have always existed in Bengal’s political grammar, but ahead of the 2026 election, they feel heavier, more personal, and more tangled with the everyday anxieties of voters. The teacher recruitment scandal—arguably the largest in the state’s recent memory—did not just generate headlines; it created an emotional rupture. Lakhs of candidates applied across multiple rounds of TET, SSC and Group C/D, and when courts later struck down thousands of appointments as “irregular,” the anger wasn’t ideological—it was intimate. Many districts such as Nadia, Hooghly, and Murshidabad have a high density of teaching aspirants, so the ripple spread quickly: coaching centres murmured, families whispered, parents questioned whether their children would ever get a fair chance. Even among TMC supporters, there is a quiet sentence you hear everywhere: “Hoyeche—eta bhalo hoyni” (Yes, something wrong happened). That single acknowledgement says more about 2026 than any slogan.
Overlaying this anger is a more diffuse but equally persistent frustration about law and order. In Kolkata’s apartments, Howrah’s market lanes, Siliguri’s tea-garden fringes, and newly growing suburbs, people talk about a sense of disorder that rarely shows up in formal numbers. Some of it does—Kolkata Police recorded rising non-cognisable complaints related to extortion and pressure during construction over the last few years—but the real conversation happens in neighbourhood stories: the builder who had to “adjust” with local boys, the trader who won’t go to the police because “party-r lok ache” (they are party-connected), the middle-class family that stays silent because confrontation feels pointless. These lived accounts create the perception that the rule of law bends according to who holds local power. Even if violent crime has not exploded numerically, the feeling of uneven justice has grown.
The memory of the 2021 post-poll violence adds another layer. Even though the violence did not engulf the whole state, the visuals were unforgettable—and the subsequent FIRs and court interventions kept them alive. Officially, over 3,000 complaints were filed across multiple districts that summer, and even if only a section of these cases led to action, the imprint remained. In parts of North 24 Parganas, Birbhum, and the Medinipur belt, opposition cadres still speak of that period with caution. The violence may have receded, but its emotional residue hasn’t. BJP invokes this legacy as proof of a “fear culture,” while TMC dismisses it as exaggerated and selectively amplified. But the fact that people still bring it up—four or five years later—shows how deeply it settled into the state’s political memory.
Women voters sit at the centre of this contradiction. Welfare schemes like Lakshmir Bhandar, which reach crores of households, give them a sense of stability unparalleled in previous governments. Many families, especially in rural South Bengal, now depend on this income stream as a predictable monthly support. Yet, the same women also speak of unease—about late-evening disturbances, about local-level fights turning political, about the feeling that their neighbourhood is not as calm as before. Their vote becomes a balance: the security provided by welfare versus the insecurity they sometimes sense around them. This tension is subtle but decisive, especially because women now form a consistently high-turnout voter group.
Opposition parties, sensing this shift, have sharpened their messages. For the BJP, corruption is presented less as a moral failing and more as a direct theft of opportunity. Their campaign now consistently links unemployment—a chronic issue in Bengal, where youth joblessness remains high—to recruitment corruption. The Left, on the other hand, frames the scandal as an assault on equality, returning to its older vocabulary of fairness and dignity. On university campuses—Jadavpur, Calcutta University, Kalyani—students repeat these themes with a clarity that wasn’t present even five years ago.
TMC counters this with a different form of data and narrative. They highlight the freezing of central funds in schemes like MGNREGA, which affected daily-wage workers in districts like East Burdwan, Malda, and Purulia. To many rural families, it appears credible when the state says Delhi is blocking Bengal’s development. The ruling party also emphasizes that welfare benefits—Kanyashree, Rupashree, Krishak Bandhu—are uninterrupted, even as the Centre “creates hurdles.” For large sections of rural women and minorities, this narrative holds greater immediate relevance than allegations of corruption in recruitment.
By 2026, corruption and law-and-order are no longer isolated complaints—they have become frames through which different sections interpret their own lives. Urban middle-class voters view them as signs of governance decay. Educated youth see them as roadblocks to dignity. Rural welfare dependents see them as secondary but unsettling pressures. SC/ST pockets in North Bengal and Jungle Mahal interpret them through the lens of safety and political autonomy. And party cadres—on all sides—see them as shifting winds that could redraw electoral arithmetic.
What emerges is a Bengal split not by ideology but by experience. Those who depend on welfare see continuity as safer. Those whose children didn’t get recruited see the system as broken. Those living in fast-growing urban belts sense the return of daily-level interference. And those who remember the post-poll violence fear the sharpening of political divides.
Corruption and law-and-order thus operate as a slow fire under the soil—quiet, steady, and emotionally powerful. They may not dominate rallies, but they dominate private conversations. And in Bengal, it is often these private conversations that ultimately decide elections.
Indian Political Debate 