West Bengal 2026: Is TMC’s “Jabar Bela” Finally Here?
West Bengam CM Mamata Banerjee holds roadshow at Baharampur (Image TMC on X)
From Adhir Ranjan Chowdhury being heckled off the campaign trail to NIA investigators reconstructing a judicial hostage crisis in Malda — and a Mamata Banerjee rally where the crowd refused to perform on cue.
By NIRENDRA DEV
Kolkata, April 5, 2026 — Something shifted in West Bengal this week. Three incidents — a veteran former MP heckled off a street corner, seven judges held hostage in a BDO office, and a crowd that fell silent when Mamata Banerjee needed them to cheer — are individually significant. Together, they read like a pattern.
The phrase doing the rounds in Bengal’s political corridors is Jabar Bela — literally, the time to go. Whether that time has truly arrived for the Trinamool Congress in the 2026 Assembly elections is the question every political observer in Kolkata is now asking.
Adhir Heckled, Central Forces Watching
On Saturday morning, veteran Congress leader and five-time former Lok Sabha MP Adhir Ranjan Chowdhury was campaigning near BT College in ward 19 of Behrampore town when a group of Trinamool Congress supporters, reportedly led by party councillor Bhiswadeb Karmakar, surrounded his convoy and began raising slogans of “Adhir Chowdhury go back.”
The sloganeering escalated into a face-off between the two camps. Chowdhury cut short his campaign and left — this, despite the presence of central forces at the site.
The optics were damaging on multiple levels. Central forces deployed to ensure free and fair campaigning stood by while a five-term MP was driven off a public street by political muscle. And the target was not an obscure local figure. In the 2024 Lok Sabha elections, Chowdhury was defeated in Baharampur by TMC nominee Yusuf Pathan — a former cricket star from Gujarat parachuted into Bengal specifically to unseat him. He lost. He is back. And he is still being heckled.
The incident poses an uncomfortable question for Rahul Gandhi and the Congress high command: what exactly do they intend to say about secularism and “vote-theft” politics in West Bengal, and when?
Malda: NIA Reconstructs a Judicial Hostage Crisis
Fifty kilometres away in Malda, a forty-member National Investigation Agency team spent Saturday reconstructing one of the most alarming incidents of the election season — the detention of seven judicial officers, including three women, at the Kaliachak 2 BDO office in Mothabari Assembly constituency last Wednesday.
The officers had been hearing cases related to “under-adjudication” voters as part of the Special Intensive Revision (SIR) drive when they were blockaded inside the premises for hours by a mob.
NIA teams revisited the BDO office, sought a minute-by-minute timeline of the protest and blockade, collected CCTV footage from cameras in and around the premises, questioned senior police officers at the Malda Superintendent of Police’s office about deployment and response mechanisms, and inspected the district police control room and wireless communication systems.
In the evening, investigators met District Magistrate Rajanvir Singh Kapur at the administrative building. Officials remained tight-lipped about the discussions.
The Additional Director General of Police (North Bengal), K. Jayaraman, had already acknowledged on Friday that there were delays in rescuing the detained judicial officers — an admission that raised serious questions about the state administration’s priorities. The judicial officers have since been relocated to a hotel on K J Sanyal Road in Englishbazar, from where they are currently discharging their duties.
The alleged mastermind of the Malda episode, Mofakkarul Islam, has been arrested — but by the state CID, not the NIA. Union Minister and BJP leader Sukanta Majumdar was pointed in his scepticism: “Whether this arrest was done for the sake of arrest or to protect him will be known after the investigation. TMC is behind the Malda episode.”
The Election Commission and NIA are both expected to submit reports on the Malda violence and the gherao of judicial officers on Monday.
The Rally Moment That Told a Bigger Story
But perhaps the most politically revealing incident of the week happened not in a courtroom or on a campaign street — it happened at a TMC election rally.
Mamata Banerjee, addressing supporters, asked the gathering: “How many of you stood in long lines for SIR?” She expected a forest of raised hands. She got silence. She repeated the question. Still silence. She reportedly said, with visible puzzlement: “What happened, why so silent?”
Then came what can only be described as the Rahul Gandhi variety of political instinct — the retreat to a familiar grievance when the current one fails to land. She pivoted: “How many of you stood in long lines during demonetisation?” The crowd responded.
The moral is plain. The SIR drive, whatever its actual impact on the ground, has not registered as an outrage in the popular imagination the way the 2016 note-ban did. Mamata read the room — but only after the room had already told her something uncomfortable.
This is what happens to demagogues in the middle-age of their political dominance. The crowd sense — that extraordinary ability to feel what a gathering feels before it knows it itself — begins to slip. It happened to others. It is happening in Bengal in 2026.
Mamata Banerjee is in danger of contracting what might be called the Rahul Gandhi syndrome: the tendency to blame all others for a poor show while remaining blind to what the mirror is saying. In Gandhi’s case, it produced years of post-defeat analysis that pointed everywhere except inward. In Mamata’s case, the 2026 election may be producing a similar reckoning — except that she, unlike Gandhi, actually runs a government and therefore has far more to lose.
The Jabar Bela may not have arrived. But the crowd’s silence at that rally suggests it is no longer unthinkable.
(This is an opinion piece. Views expressed are the author’s own.)
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