The 2026 West Bengal elections has a historic parallel in the story of Boleya Mummeya Nayaka, a rogue chieftain whose reign of terror in the Araga-Rajya was swiftly crushed by the Vijayanagara Emperor Praudha Devaraya. While ancient rulers acted with alacrity to nip rebellion in the bud, modern India—specifically West Bengal—allowed a state of revolt to fester for over fifty years, eventually requiring the intervention of armed forces to safeguard democratic processes.
This essay concludes that the 2026 Bengal Elections mark a definitive rejection of Bhadralok terrorism and secessionist tendencies. By voting as a consolidated identity, Bengali Hindus have halted a trajectory towards a separate "Bengali" nation.
PRAUDHA DEVARAYA, THE GREATEST Vijayanagara Emperor who preceded Krishnadevaraya by sixty-three years was in the fifth year of his monarchy when an insurrection erupted in the Araga-Rajya located about 250 kms from his splendid capital. Now known as Malenadu, Araga was one of the key provinces of the Vijayanagara Empire.
The mutiny was incited and frontally led by Boleya Mummeya Nayaka, a rogue chieftain of the Bedar (hunter) tribe. The inscription which narrates this grim episode tells us how Mummeya Nayaka launched recurring raids of plunder and devastation that left thousands slaughtered and decapitated and how he revelled in stuffing his jails with innocent prisoners. His reign of terror greatly reduced the prosperity of the province and was “causing many great disturbances and famine.”
The moment this news reached Praudha Devaraya, he issued an order on the spot: that Beda rogue must be brought to order immediately. The man entrusted with this weighty task was Viranna Wodeyar, the minister in charge of Araga-Rajya.
Wasting no time, Viranna Wodeyar summoned the chieftains of all the 18 Kampanas (districts) of Araga and ordered them to marshal their forces. At the meeting to chalk out the plan of action, Tiraka Gowda, a leader of the cavalry, uttered a heroic promise to vanquish the recalcitrant rebel in such a manner that “the valour of my troops shall be sung in songs by posterity.”
Tiraka Gowda kept his word; he not only slew Boleya Mummeya Nayaka but perished in the skirmish as a hero.
THIS EPISODE STRUCK ME as an instructive parallel in the aftermath of the Bengal assembly elections that witnessed a record voter turnout and steamrolled the TMC’s citadel.
The foremost parallel is the alacrity that Praudha Devaraya showed the moment he heard of Mummeya Nayaka’s insurgency. It took just one minor commander of a small cavalry unit to squelch the rebellion in its infancy.
West Bengal has been in a state of revolt for half a century; forget nipping it in the bud, it was allowed to fester and grow until it became a ravenous ogre that had to be tamed only with overwhelming force. The fact that it took the intervention of the armed forces to conduct the Bengal elections — the most fundamental edifice of a functioning democracy — is the surest proof of the proportions that this revolt had reached.
The results of May 4 are much less about the deserved and the long-overdue overthrow of the TMC but more about keeping India’s sovereignty intact and whole.
THE HISTORICAL ANCHOR of the TMC’s three-term teror-regime was first dropped by the Nehruvian Congress fresh after India attained freedom from British rule. Since independence, West Bengal has been anything but normal. Once it found itself firmly and safely in power, the Congress initially fed off the carcass of the British plunder of the Bengal Presidency and set in motion an uncontrollable series of far-reaching consequences.
On August 11, 1947, the Interim Government passed the Bengal Disturbed Areas (Special Powers of Armed Forces) Ordinance to quell the mayhem unleashed by the Partition of India. Bengal after all, was the launchpad from where Indian Muslims carved out Pakistan. This Ordinance was modelled after the repressive Defence of India Act, 1915.
By mid-1948, this Ordinance had morphed into various (State) Security Acts throughout India. In brief, its provisions included arbitrary arrests, police torture and detentions without the right to trial. The manner in which individual liberty and right to life was smothered by the Congress is a story that needs a comprehensive retelling.
A crucial chapter in this Robespierresque saga is the role played by the Communists in Bengal. A forgotten fact of recent history is that the original Communist Party of India (CPI) had been banned until the Calcutta High Court lifted it in 1951. With a rather impressive street power, they took full advantage of the post-partition chaos and ran riot in Calcutta; like Mummeya Nayaka, they indulged in widespread violence, loot, arson and anarchy.
The obvious consequences included arrests, imprisonment and detention of their bloodthirsty cadre. They formed the lion’s share of criminal court cases that came up for hearing.
To this extent, the Security Act was justified.
A PROMINENT COMMUNIST leader who was thus arrested on March 26, 1948 was an MLA and a founding member of the CPI.
His name was Jyotirindra Basu.
This was his maiden arrest.
Under the provisions of the West Bengal Security Act, he was detained without trial.
The advocate arguing on his behalf framed his defence on the following main grounds:
1. The detention under the West Bengal Security Act was illegal in multiple respects: the order was bad in form for not specifying particulars of the alleged subversive acts.
2. The detention was mala fide — motivated by political purposes (to muzzle opposition in the Assembly, to suppress trade union activity, to facilitate election outcomes) and by ill-will — and relied on facts such as the detenu's political and trade-union activity.
3. The "reasonable grounds" (for arrest) requirement should be reviewed objectively by the Court.
The journalist and editor D.F. Karaka who covered this case in extensive detail frames it as an issue of personal liberty and almost wholly ignores Jyoti Basu’s credentials as a diehard and dangerous Communist. At one point in his commentary, Karaka quotes the Chief Justice of the Calcutta High Court, which severely reprimanded the Congress Government:
What is reasonable to a nitwit may not be so to others. Every government makes mistakes and I should say the West Bengal government is no exception…If that be so, then nobody could oppose the government at elections, as the government will put all its opponents into prison during the elections, detaining them without their getting any redress whatsoever.
In our own time, the TMC, for fifteen years, deployed far more brutal tactics than mere imprisonment of its political opponents. It ensured that its thuggish party cadre gave proxy votes on behalf of the citizens or ensured favourable voting by instilling terror in their minds.
In the end, Jyoti Basu lost the case but he had become a living martyr. The CPI and its media ecosystem — most notably, the People’s Age (formerly, People’s War) — milked his trial with brilliant skill. A People’s Hero was being manufactured.
Meanwhile, the Congress hadn’t realised how badly it had been outfoxed. It had deployed strong-arm methods to subdue an enemy that played by no known rules of engagement; that enemy was also endowed with an uncanny knack to infinitely reinvent itself.
It took twenty-one determined years for Jyoti Basu to initially dislodge the Congress from Bengal and eight more years to ensure that the Congress would be permanently eradicated. In reality, the Congress had scripted its own extinction. While it kept winning elections, the CPI — later, CPI (M) — was consistently amassing its strength with an unassailable combination of street agitations in Calcutta and armed revolts in the countryside. In a parallel development, it had captured the entire tribe of the Bhadralok mafia which delivered a perennial supply of political workers and leaders and academic and intellectual sympathisers.
On the national stage, prominent Communist leaders and “thinkers” had imprisoned Indira Gandhi’s mind. In fact, till date, nobody has manipulated Indira Gandhi with such aplomb as the Communists. But by the time she realised her folly, it was too late. One of her closest political chefs, Siddharth Shankar Ray, performed the Congress’ funeral rites in Bengal when he cooked a savage meal in his crackdown against Maoist terrorists and Marxist student unions.
During his tenure as Chief Minister, Ray took a promising and fiery young woman under his wings and became her lifelong mentor. Her name was Mamata Banerjee. She had majored in Islamic history in her M.A., and had created a stir in the Congress circles for her energetic organisational activity. She shot to fame in 1975 when she publicly danced atop the bonnet of Jayaprakash Narayan’s car to protest against his protest against the Emergency. Under Ray’s guidance, her star swiftly rose.
This is the Nth time that I’m saying it and I’ll say it again: the Congress is the mothership of all ills plaguing India since 1947.
The lethal Congress hand — or Khooni Panja as Narendra Modi memorably described it — is visible behind every separatist and secessionist movement. It is visible chiefly in three manifestations — appeasement, apathy and surrender followed by supplication. In fact, the decadal decline and dismemberment of the party is a superb case study in how to wilfully squander strength. It forgot a timeless lesson from the Mahabharata: Bhima only fought with equals, not with petty streetside goondas.
Barring few, every regional party that captured power symbolised successive organ depletions of the Congress body. Again, barring few, the Congress never returned to power in the states that it had lost. Two of these states are particularly notable for the sheer duration that they kept the Congress out of power — Tamil Nadu, since 1967 and West Bengal since 1977.
EVERY BENGALI ASSOCIATION located in India outside Bengal is an admission of three facets of a single truth: Hindu persecution at home leading to exodus.
Unlike the forced exodus of about four lakh Kashmiri Hindus in one gargantuan burst, the exodus of Bengali Hindus from their homeland happened through a million painful trickles spread over half a century.
The Kashmiri Hindu tragedy was merely the twentieth century version of a religious phenomenon that dates back to Muhammad bin Qasim. It was motivated, scripted and executed by successive Muslim Chief Ministers with the overt and covert support of Pakistan.
The exodus of Bengali Hindus in instalments occurred at the hands of a section of Bengali Hindus who had sworn to chop off the very cultural roots that defined them.
Which brings us back to the Bengali Associations outside Bengal — all of them comprise entirely of Hindus. What they had left behind at home was effortlessly usurped by the very community that had seeded India’s Partition and had sliced off a huge chunk of their original, undivided homeland. Back then, this community had the unstinted backing of one of their own — Suhrawardy. Now, they had the backing of the very people that the partition-hungry community brands as Kaffirs; Kaffirs who proudly called themselves as Communists.
Three and half decades of the suzerainty of Communist terror in Bengal largely remains an untold story. Almost every “mainstream” criticism of Communist misrule in Bengal begins and ends with economics. Apart from a few recent accounts, there is deafening silence about the appalling Hindu cost of this prolonged Red nightmare. The blood-soaked record of Jyoti Basu has not only been sanitised but made respectable. It is so chilling that Siddharth Shankar Ray appears like an endearing cherub before Jyoti Basu, Bengal’s homegrown answer to Stalin.
Jyoti Basu governmentalised the Communist ideology and transformed the bureaucracy and the police into extension counters of the CPI(M). This was the chief secret sauce that sustained Communist rule for so long. This was also how his government elevated illegal immigrations of Bangladeshi Muslims into both an art and science.
But there was an equally powerful secret sauce that complemented this perversion of Bengal’s administrative and legal apparatus. This was the unqualified support of the Bhadralok, the same putrid class from which Jyoti Basu rose.
IN POPULAR PARLANCE, the Bengali Bhadralok signified a social class that stood for intellect, culture and refinement. The generic meaning of Bhadralok is “gentlefolk.”
The Sanskrit word, Bhadra typically means, “auspicious,” “noble,” “prosperous,” “kind,” and “compassionate.” It also means “hypocrite” and “impostor” — the perfect description of this species of termites.
Throughout Bharatavarsha’s history, it is hard to find a more self-serving and vile class. Its demonstrated capacity to justify and intellectualise gross crimes against humanity is unmatched.
The Bengali Bhadralok was born as the necromantic spawn of the victorious East India Company built on the wreckage of the Nawabi regime of Bengal. This Bhadralok started off as a typical bottom-feeding clique of political and clerical opportunists but soon grew into a quasi republic with its own set of rules.
From remaining quiescent during the 1857 war of Independence to Mamata Banerjee’s untrammelled despotism, there is no evil that the Bhadralok has not endorsed, whitewashed and justified. Its capacity for apologising to evil is unparalleled.
What is truly astonishing is its stunning longevity and its immunity against threats to its very survival. The Bhadralok has continuously existed for about 170 years. Throughout this period, it has been subjected to vicious but entirely deserved criticism and attacks from various quarters but nothing has dented it. From Kaliprasanna Sinha’s scathing satirical classic, Hootum Pyanchar Naksha (The Observant Owl) published in 1861 to countless eviscerations, the Bhadralok absorbed everything; if anything, it only grew stronger.
Mamata Banerjee tried to dismantle it in her first term and succeeded to an extent but she never realised when she herself had been co-opted by the Bhadralok. Two eminent, living proofs testify to this fact — Derek O’Brien and Sagarika Ghose.
The former hails from entrenched Bhadralok gentry; the latter is an NRB — non-resident Bhadralok but now a full-fledged one. Both are Rajya Sabha members from the TMC; both provided cover fire to the endless atrocities committed by the original TMC.
You will not find the equivalent of the Bhadralok in any other state in India because of its founding charter. It was created as a class of rent-seekers serving an oppressive, alien colonial imperialism; unsurprisingly, this rent-seeking psyche has remained intact; only the outward trappings have changed.
The Bengali Bhadralok is the ultimate epitome of servility and dependence. It cannot survive without a Master wielding a whip or cane; it can generate no new ideas or innovation — it never did. The character and the moral and ethical content of the Master is therefore not open for scrutiny. In the colonial era, the Bhadralok exulted in being the “comprador sub-elites” of the British, as Joya Chatterji accurately describes in her The Spoils of Partition: Bengal and India, 1947-1967.
IN THE 1920s, a leading figure that emerged from the perfumed Bhadralok trenches was M.N. Roy, India’s first Communist terrorist. He consciously opted to become the comprador not of the British but of Lenin.
The roots of Communism in India can thus be clearly traced back to the Bengali Bhadralok. M.N. Roy’s fetid career as a convinced Communist also provides the most precise answer to a persistent question that I am repeatedly asked: how did a sacred land that took pride in and inspiration from Chaitanya Mahaprabhu, Bankim, Ramakrishna Parmahamsa and Swami Vivekananda begin blindly worshipping mass-murderers like Lenin, Mao, Stalin, Pol Pot, Fidel Castro and Che Guevara?
The Bhadralok’s golden age was the 19th century; their servility had transformed them into overnight royalty. But after Curzon’s partition of Bengal, the balance of power decisively shifted in favour of Muslims whose inborn aggression, expansionist mindset and demography these “gentlefolk” of the Bhadralok simply couldn’t match. Desperate to retain their fast-eroding pelf and privilege, they found their saviours in Marx, Lenin & co.
THREE DECADES after M.N. Roy discovered Communism, undivided Bengal had become “West” Bengal and its Bhadralok had smoothly transitioned its servility to its new Masters in the USSR and China. The notorious Writers’ Building in Calcutta became the national den where capers were hatched to — for example — assist China if it was compassionate enough to invade India.
Under Jyoti Basu — another Bhadralok darling — West Bengal officially entered the phase of active revolt against the Indian Union. But he was shrewd enough to paint it in respectable colours; it was not regarded as a revolt against India’s sovereignty but as a spontaneous mass movement against exploitation. He was finally forced to reveal his hand when the BJP grew at a frenetic pace in the 1990s; a Dutch journalist, Bas Heijne quoted Basu and Ashoka Mitra as declaring that Bengal would secede from India if the BJP ever came to power.
It was also under Jyoti Basu’s Red regime that the CPI(M) had perfected the art of rigging elections. His methods were fail-proof because he never directly got his hands dirty. No matter how outrageous the election-rigging was, the taint was overwhelmed by his exterior image — genteel, well-mannered, well-read, soft-spoken, sauve, courteous and hospitable. It was simply unthinkable that such a man was capable of even harbouring a violent thought. But his reality was known to those in the same field. S. Gurumurthy was one of them. In his perceptive obituary, he unmasked the Hyde hiding inside Jyoti Basu:
"The State website www.jyotibasu.net says that Jyoti Basu “is known primarily” for “establishing a seemingly indestructible Communist control over some of the levers of the state-level political power in West Bengal”. The official website says that he achieved this by combining “communist extra parliamentary” political tactic with the parliamentary tactic “aimed at establishing indestructible Communist control”. But could ‘indestructible communist’ control be consistent with parliamentary democratic process? No… But a re-reading of the official website makes it evident that what it talks of is not democratic, but “Communist”, parliamentary and extra-parliamentary political tactics…
In its editorial dated August 6, 2003 written in the context of the unprecedented violence that marked the panchayat polls in the state which the CPI(M) had won, The Statesman newspaper said it was not “the popularity of the Marxists” that was the reason for the marginalisation of the opposition parties in the elections, but, it was the Marxists’ “expertise in fixing elections by violence, intimidation, and by simple expedient of preventing opposition candidates from filing nominations” … The Marxists never considered it a sin to fix elections by fraud and violence, and if they did it, no stigma would attach to them! The use of this extra parliamentary tactic…is the secret of Jyoti Basu’s success in perpetuating communist control over the State apparatus in West Bengal. But more than this achievement, that he did so without being faulted for it speaks volumes about how an acceptable face can make unacceptable things acceptable to the people who count.
Jyoti Basu was the face of Bengali Communism most acceptable to the Bengali Bhadralok… His dress and circle of friends readily identified him with the Bengali Bhadralok and endeared him to the media in Bengal dominated by the Bhadralok, which in turn made him inevitable for the party within. Result, Bhadralok actually dominated Bengali politics more under the Marxists than even under the Congress."
In reality, Bengal was ruled not by the CPI(M) but by Jyoti Basu. His unceremonious dumping by his own party shattered its hold on Bengal within a decade.
When Mamata Banerjee defeated the CPI(M) in 2011, she obliterated it. Fifteen years later, her own party has been obliterated by the BJP.
MAMATA BANERJEE was the unlikely creation of both the Congress and the CPI(M). She rose to prominence in the Congress when it was hurtling towards extinction in Bengal. By the time she correctly realised that the party had no future, she quit it. But she had learned all there was to learn about Bengal politics.
On a parallel track, she had also learned invaluable lessons from the CPI(M) as well; on how to wield dictatorial control over both her party and the government. But more devastatingly, she had learned how to use state-sponsored terror to ensure zero opposition at election time. Jyoti Basu had done all these with a veneer of finesse. Mamata simply opted for brute force. Her mantra was straightforward — when in doubt, unleash your goon squad. The law must be respected because I am the law.
Another indispensable lesson that she had learned from the CPI(M) was the infinite power of the infinite Muslim vote bank. Whereas the CPI(M) — relatively speaking — ensured that it kept a tight lid on its brazen Muslim appeasement and kept it within manageable limits, Mamata packed her party and cabinet with avowed Jihadis: both homegrown and Bangladesh imports.
In 2011, Bengali Hindus, bled dry by three decades of Communist tyranny overwhelmingly voted for Mamata Banerjee’s rosy slogan of Poriborton — change. What they got instead was a twin hell.
By then, CPI(M) leaders, politicans and workers had swiftly shed their Communist loyalties and flooded the TMC so that their business would go on as usual. Now they were joined by the Jihadis who clearly knew that they were indispensable to Mamata.
The obvious consequences followed. In her second term, Bengali Hindus had almost forgotten the three-decade-long Communist horror that they had endured. The legacy Bhadralok’s guilt-free transition from Communist servility to becoming Didi’s pet doggies was effortless. The most loyal of this pool of pets was The Telegraph, owned by the Sarkar family. For nearly one and half decades, this rag maintained rapt silence over the escalating slew of Jihadi atrocities against Bengali Hindus.
Which brings us to a vital difference between the CPI(M) and the TMC regimes. While the Communists seeded the fatal trend of importing Muslims en masse from Bangladesh and generally pampering the community, they did not openly persecute Hindus.
Mamata Banerjee not only inaugurated a regime of open Hindu persecution but did it on a scale that would’ve made Aurangzeb proud. In her third and final term, she had transformed Bengal into a national security threat and a hell-hole for Hindus. Vast swathes of the state were ruled by proxies from Bangladesh’s Jihadi machinery leading to frequent Hindu exoduses.
The ultimate advertisement of Mamata Banerjee’s Hindu persecution was targetting the Durga Puja just as Aurangzeb had banned Deepavali in Gujarat while he was merely a governor. What led her to this nadir is an ageless phenomenon best described by Winston Churchill — an appeaser is one who feeds a crocodile hoping it will eat him last.
Roughly beginning around the midpoint of her second term, her Jihadi vote bank demanded and got more and greater concessions.
Wore the Hijaab? Not enough.
Iftar party attendance? Not enough.
Hikes in Imam salaries? Not enough.
5000 more Madrassas? Not enough.
10x illegal immigrations from Bangladesh? Not enough.
Police immunity against human trafficking, weapons smuggling, land grab, love Jihad, temple destruction and murders and rapes of Hindus? Not enough.
Curtailing the Durga Puja? Ah! Now we’re talking…
But to repeat the same point: the Bhadralok was either complicit in all these or had adopted selective blindness. Hindu lives, honour and property were a great bargain for a Rajya Sabha seat; after all, as a Rajya Sabha member, you get to sell your parliamentary login credentials for a lucrative sum excluding sparkling wine, a cuban cigar and an imported mongrel that’s worth the annual salary of an average lower middle class Bengali Hindu.
Mamata Banerjee’s absolute surrender to the Jihadis within and outside her party and government showed how she had lost control. The more outrageous their demand, the more desperately she succumbed. Which is what ultimately did her in. Her Hindu voters were no longer voters but victims awaiting vengeance. And they wreaked it in style.
THE 2026 BENGAL ELECTIONS are as historic as the 2014 general elections; perhaps more historic because Bengal was perched on the brink of secession. In a way, Mamata Banerjee’s three-term misrule had come close to realising Jyoti Basu’s dream of a separate Bengali nation.
Seven years after Article 370 was abolished, how many Hindus — even Kashmiri Hindus — are willing to settle there like how they settle in Delhi, Mumbai, Bangalore, Gurgaon or Hyderabad? And for how long did Kashmir exist in a state of quasi independence cleansed of its Hindu population? That cleansing in Bengal was done by Hindus themselves and supported by the Bhadralok, 99 percent of whom are Hindus. It is this ongoing cleansing that has been temporarily halted by the 2026 elections.
The BJP’s stupendous triumph owes to its single-minded focus to win Bengal at all costs. It also owes to Bengali Hindus who voted as Hindus — a basic truth of survival that they realised after paying unimaginable costs. In any form of government, identity protects, identity builds prosperity and identity deters enemies.
I sincerely hope that hope is finally materialising in Bengal. The BJP’s brute majority notwithstanding, it will first need to combat an evil ecosystem that predates the TMC. More importantly, the BJP needs to be constantly watchful of the countless, well-placed timebombs that its opponent has placed all over. Home Minister Amit Shah’s astute warning to seal the West Bengal secretariat conveys precisely this message.
BENGAL IS THE ONLY STATE in living memory where the Prime Minister, Home Minister and bigwigs of the central government were forced to personally conduct one state’s elections with the assistance of a sizeable contingent of the armed forces. Every polling booth in Bengal had become a potential war zone. Had violence erupted like it did in 2021, the inevitable and guaranteed victims would’ve been Bengali Hindus.
Doesn’t this remind you of that seditious Araga chieftain, Boleya Mummeya Nayaka? In his time, there was no democracy anywhere in the world; only armed action decided matters.
In its fundamental spirit, what Mamata Banerjee had done for fifteen years was no different from what Mummeya Nayaka had done. She was waging a deadly and sustained war against the Indian Republic by perverting the Constitutional powers it had given her. The more damning element is the fact that she persists in it despite losing so decisively. Back in the Vijayanagara Empire, Mummeya Nayaka had persisted in the same folly only to meet his well-earned end. The form of government has vastly changed since the Vijayanagara era but people’s basic impulses are unalterable. And so, Mamata Banerjee might force an unceremonious sacking upon herself.
What Mamata Banerjee had promised was Poriborton but what she really wanted was unbridled personal power forever. Her humiliating rout may well be the beginning of the true price she will pay for it.
|| Jai Kali Maa ||
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