Bengal’s battlefield choice: how identity politics repeatedly dominates the electoral issues

West Bengal’s elections increasingly look less like a straight contest of manifestos and more like a contest over what the election is about. Whoever decides the “battlefield”—jobs and crime, or identity and symbolism—often decides how voters coordinate, how opposition space shrinks, and how the state’s political map consolidates.

In a first-past-the-post system, this matters enormously. When an election is framed as a binary, existential fight, voters tend to behave strategically—coalescing around the two most viable poles. When an election is framed around local delivery and everyday grievances, voters feel freer to back smaller forces, alliances, or locally credible candidates.

The last three major electoral moments in the state reveal the pattern in hard numbers.

The vote-share story: bipolar elections snap back to ~85%

When West Bengal becomes a statewide, high-salience contest, the combined vote share of the two principal parties climbs into the mid-80s.

• Assembly 2021: Trinamool Congress 48.02% and BJP 38.15%—a combined 86.17%.
• Lok Sabha 2024 (West Bengal): Trinamool about 46.2% and BJP about 39.1%—roughly ~85.3% combined.

In other words: when the contest feels like “either-or,” much of the electorate lines up behind one of two banners, and the space for third forces collapses.

Panchayat 2023: a different arena creates a different outcome

The panchayat election offered a contrasting political environment: intensely local stakes, local candidates, and hyper-grounded grievances. The numbers shifted sharply.

• Panchayat 2023: TMC 51.14%, BJP 22.92% (combined 74.06%), while the Sanjukta Morcha bloc took 23.02%.

That ~23% was not one party; it was an alliance container—Left plus Congress plus ISF and others under a joint banner. The result illustrates a basic structural point: local elections reduce the “wasted vote” anxiety that drives statewide bipolar consolidation. Voters can vote for a bloc they believe can win here, even if it can’t win statewide.

A simple model: parties choosing the axis of competition

The recurring pattern can be explained as a strategic choice between two campaign axes:

1. Identity axis: religion, cultural symbolism, insider–outsider frames, and “asmita” narratives.
2. Governance axis: employment, law and order, corruption, delivery, competence.

These axes are not merely rhetorical. They change voter behaviour.

• Under an identity axis, the election becomes emotionally charged and high-stakes. Voters sort into camps. Strategic voting increases. The contest looks two-way, and the system rewards the two biggest players.
• Under a governance axis, voters evaluate performance, local credibility and administrative outcomes. Coordination pressure reduces, and third-front space expands—especially where alliances look locally viable.

This is why the same state can produce ~85% bipolar concentration in one election cycle and a sizable third-front vote in another.

Why identity framing benefits both top contenders—without requiring collusion

It is possible for two rivals to benefit from the same battleground even while fighting viciously on it. The incentives align.

For the state incumbent, identity-centric politics can be a shield when governance becomes a difficult audit. Even incumbents with welfare narratives gain when the election’s emotional center shifts away from performance comparison and toward symbolic conflict, cultural pride, and group anxiety.

For the principal opposition, identity politics often provides the quickest route to consolidation: clearer bloc formation, sharper “us versus them,” and a cleaner statewide binary. A governance-heavy election, by contrast, can widen the aperture for a third-front alliance to reclaim relevance and threaten the “principal opposition” position—particularly where local networks and cadre structures matter.

Thus identity-centric polarization can simultaneously:

• help the incumbent avoid a pure governance referendum, and
• help the principal opposition prevent fragmentation of the anti-incumbent vote.

The outcome is not a conspiracy so much as an equilibrium: once one major player leans into identity, the other often cannot afford to ignore it without appearing absent from the dominant emotional narrative.

The third front’s opportunity—and its internal contradiction

The third-front alliance’s best route is straightforward: keep the contest rooted in local issues, and look credible enough—seat by seat—to reduce strategic voting. Panchayat 2023 demonstrated that when local realities dominate, voters are willing to back an alternative bloc at scale.

But alliances contain contradictions. A national party within a third-front arrangement may be pulled in two directions:

• State incentive: alliance and governance focus maximize relevance inside West Bengal.
• National incentive: maintaining distance from the state incumbent may serve central-level ambitions and bargaining posture, even if it weakens the alliance’s statewide coherence.

That tension can undermine the third front’s ability to project a single, credible statewide alternative—precisely what is required to break the bipolar snapback in an assembly election.

What the pattern suggests

West Bengal’s recent trajectory shows how elections oscillate between two modes:

• Statewide, identity-saturated mode: high strategic voting, two-pole consolidation, and combined vote shares near ~85% (2021, 2024).
• Local, governance-saturated mode: greater space for alliance blocs and third forces (panchayat 2023).

The question for 2026 is therefore less about whether identity politics will appear—it almost always does—and more about whether it becomes the central axis that forces the electorate back into a binary. When it does, governance issues do not disappear; they simply take a backseat.