<\/p>\nZubeen question<\/h4>\n<\/p>\n
Woven into the Assam campaign was also the name of Zubeen Garg.Garg, 52, was the state’s most beloved singer, a voice that had travelled well beyond language, into the daily life of the Northeast. On September 19, 2025, he died while swimming off an island in Singapore. A coroner’s court there called it accidental drowning. Sarma did not accept that. He claimed Garg was “murdered as part of a conspiracy.\u201dCongress saw the opening and took it. It promised voters justice in Garg’s death within 100 days of coming to power. Sarma pushed back- the judiciary, he said, was not a campaign promise, and no party could guarantee a court outcome on an election timeline. But in Assam, where Garg’s songs were less entertainment than memory, that kind of correctness had limited reach.<\/p>\nThe 90 lakh question<\/h2>\n<\/p>\n
In West Bengal, the most extraordinary number of the campaign season wasn’t a seat projection or a vote-share figure. It was 90 lakh \u2014 the number of voters erased from the electoral rolls before a single vote was cast.The Special Intensive Revision of electoral rolls resulted in close to 90 lakh names being removed from West Bengal’s voter lists, many of them concentrated in border areas and non-elite rural, caste, and minority-heavy districts. Of those who filed appeals, roughly 27 lakh individuals sought restoration of their voting rights. Just about 1,400 voters were actually able to secure relief through the tribunals set up to review cases \u2014 leaving almost all applicants without restoration.1,400 out of 27 lakh. The TMC said the exercise risked disenfranchising genuine voters. The BJP said it was a necessary correction of bogus entries and names of illegal migrants. The matter went to court.Against this backdrop, West Bengal recorded its highest-ever voter turnout. The first phase saw a 92.8% turnout, a record, arriving after the 90-lakh reduction in the voter roll earlier in the year.Mamata Banerjee, seeking a fourth consecutive term, delivered one of the most-quoted lines of the entire election season. At a rally in Kolkata’s Chowringhee, she said: “Remember this, you cannot defeat us. We fight against injustice; we fight for our rights. I was born in Bengal, and I shall breathe my last in this very Bengal. I will take over Delhi once I have secured victory in Bengal. I will do so by rallying all the political parties together. I won’t want the seat of power; I want the complete dismantling of the BJP in Delhi.”Amit Shah, campaigning in Kolkata at the same time, responded with a laugh, saying she had nothing left in Bengal, so how would she go to Delhi. The exchange dominated headlines for days.<\/p>\nFish, identity and political theatre<\/h4>\n<\/p>\n
But if one image captured the texture of West Bengal’s 2026 campaign more vividly than any speech or slogan, it was a fish.Koustav Bagchi, a lawyer-turned-politician and the BJP’s candidate from Barrackpore, moved from door to door in crisp white and red traditional attire, a fish in hand. Drums thudded behind him as supporters chanted his name.A few kilometres away in Kolkata’s port area, another BJP candidate, Rakesh Singh, staged a similar spectacle, dressed for effect and flanked by party workers, hoisting a fish repeatedly as he moved through early-morning crowds, taking on city mayor Firhad Hakim in one of the state’s high-profile contests.In Bengal, fish is more than food. It is the bloodstream of the cuisine. In 2026, that resonance was being staged as political theatre, with candidates brandishing it to quell a very specific anxiety.<\/p>\n\n
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The anxiety had been created by Mamata Banerjee herself. At a rally in Basirhat’s Swarupnagar, she tore into what she called the BJP’s fish “lies”, saying Bengal “eats up what it produces,” and questioned the saffron party’s silence on the “targeting of meat and fish shops” if it was such a big fan of the aquatic vertebrate. “In their states, they will not allow you to eat fish, meat and eggs. Who are they to decide what people will eat?” she thundered. She also reminded the audience of how “people are tortured and lynched in BJP-governed states for speaking in Bengali.”The BJP scrambled to answer on its own terms. BJP MP Anurag Thakur participated in a public show of eating fish during a poll campaign. Seen eating fish and meat with party workers at a local hotel in Kolkata, he said: “The BJP has Chief Ministers in 16 states. There, people can eat whatever they want and they can practice whichever religion they want. We do not want to impose restrictions on food or religion.” He then accused Banerjee of spreading misinformation to malign his party’s image.From PM Modi to Amit Shah, the fish debate reached the campaign speeches of even the top brass of the BJP as they tried to shed their “outsider” and “vegetarian” image in Bengal. The campaign had reduced, at one level, to a contest over who could more convincingly claim the right to a plate of hilsa.<\/p>\nTriangular tussle in God’s own country<\/h2>\n<\/p>\n
Kerala has had a simple political rule since 1982: Left wins, Left loses. Congress wins, Congress loses. Swap. Repeat. Pinarayi Vijayan broke it in 2021 by winning two terms in a row. In 2026, he was going for three \u2014 something no Kerala government has ever done.That was one story. The bigger story on the campaign trail was the BJP. For the first time in the state’s political history, a strong three-way contest was visible in nearly every constituency. Unlike previous elections, where the LDF and UDF often benefited from tacit cross-voting to keep the BJP at bay, both fronts this time found themselves under genuine pressure from the NDA.The closing days of the campaign were marked by controversy on all sides. In Palakkad, BJP workers were allegedly caught distributing cash, with videos circulating widely. The Congress, meanwhile, faced allegations over the misuse of funds collected for housing landslide victims in Wayanad. Both stories spread fast. Both were loudly denied.What also stood out was the spectacle of two national INDIA bloc partners spending much of the campaign attacking each other rather than the BJP. Each alliance accused the other of colluding with the BJP and compromising Kerala’s secular tradition.The campaign period was also unusually short- just three weeks. Despite that, Prime Minister Modi, home minister Amit Shah, and Rahul Gandhi all visited the state multiple times. Everyone wanted Kerala. Everyone treated it like it could actually change hands.<\/p>\n\n
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Watch<\/span><\/p>\n Fish, Film Stars, Singer Zubeen & Pinarayi: 4 Uniques of This Election | I Witness<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
<\/p>\nHotel lobby, lottery king’s son and Puducherry’s magnificent chaos<\/h2>\n<\/p>\n
And then there is Puducherry \u2014 proof that you don’t need millions of voters to generate industrial quantities of political drama.The standout moment of the Puducherry campaign happened not at a rally or in a manifesto but in a hotel lobby where a Union minister sat, waited for nearly two hours and was stood up.Chief Minister Rangasamy’s AINRC had placed two firm conditions for staying in the NDA: opposition to the inclusion of the newly formed Latchiya Jananayaga Katchi of Jose Charles Martin \u2014 son of lottery king Santiago Martin \u2014 in the alliance, and a renewed demand for statehood for Puducherry. The BJP agreed to neither. Union Minister Mansukh Mandaviya arrived at a hotel in the UT for alliance talks. Rangasamy did not attend the meeting.Until that Thursday evening, there was genuine speculation that Rangasamy might exit the NDA entirely to form an alliance with Vijay’s TVK. The BJP immediately dispatched Mandaviya to Puducherry on a special flight to persuade him. The alliance eventually held.Jose Charles Martin remained one of the most-watched figures of the Puducherry contest. His father Santiago Martin built one of India’s largest lottery businesses. The son launched a party from scratch ahead of these elections and negotiated his way into the ruling alliance. In a union territory with 30 constituencies and fewer than a million voters, where individual constituencies have between 30,000 and 50,000 electors, the dynamics of money, access, and influence operate differently from larger states.Despite everything, Puducherry recorded 89.87% voter turnout- the highest since 1964, the year of the first election after the territory’s merger with India. When political stakes feel personal, people show up. In Puducherry, they always do.<\/p>\nWhat it all adds up to<\/h2>\n<\/p>\n
Across five states, India’s 2026 election season was less a referendum on any single policy than a vivid exhibition of what this democracy looks and feels like when it runs at full throttle.A megastar’s mania turned lethal before his campaign officially began \u2014 and he kept campaigning anyway, more cautiously, in the shadow of 41 deaths.A chief minister posted an AI-generated video of himself shooting at a religious minority, watched it go viral, watched it get deleted and then defended it.Ninety lakh voters were struck from a list, those who remained on it showed up in record numbers, as if to answer the deletion with defiance.And in Puducherry, a Union minister sat alone in a hotel lobby, stood up by an ally in India’s smallest electoral theatre, over a dispute involving a lottery baron\u2019s son.<\/div>\n
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Source link <\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The dust has finally settled on the EVMs across five distinct corners of India. From the rain-washed palm groves of Kerala to the tea-stained hills of Assam, the 2026 Assembly Elections have been a marathon of high-decibel rhetoric, shifting loyalties, and a digital-age makeover of the classic Indian padyatra.While the results remain locked in the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":12335,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[133],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-12334","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-country"},"amp_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/banitoday.com\/hi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12334","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/banitoday.com\/hi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/banitoday.com\/hi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/banitoday.com\/hi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/banitoday.com\/hi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=12334"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/banitoday.com\/hi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12334\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/banitoday.com\/hi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/12335"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/banitoday.com\/hi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=12334"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/banitoday.com\/hi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=12334"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/banitoday.com\/hi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=12334"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
![\"Fish,](\"https:\/\/static.toiimg.com\/thumb\/msid-130734836,imgsize-1136435,width-400,height-225,resizemode-4\/130734836.jpg\")
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