West Bengal Assembly Elections 2026 | BJP banks on 'Vande Mataram' in Bankim's birthplace

Naihati(West Bengal): Bankim Chandra Chattopadhyay is ubiquitous in Naihati.

The suburban town on the bank of the Hooghly River in West Bengal has a school, a college, a library, a road, a bridge, and even an industrial park, not to mention quite a few shops, named after the Sahitya Samrat (Emperor of Literature), as the 19th-century doyen of Bengal’s literary renaissance is revered.

He has now landed in the midst of the campaign cacophony in poll-bound West Bengal, too. The Bharatiya Janata Party has fielded Sumitro Chattopadhyay, a fifth-generation descendant of the literary icon’s brother, Purna Chandra Chattopadhyay, as its candidate in Naihati. Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s government celebrated the 150th anniversary of Vande Mataram a few months back, and the saffron party obviously couldn’t let go of the opportunity to reap its political dividends in the birthplace of the composer of the national song.

Rishi Bankim first imagined Bharat as Mata and revolutionised patriotism with his stirring ode to the motherland, says Sumitro, who takes pride in his illustrious ancestor’s nationalist legacy, carried down through generations in his family.

“I am with the BJP today because it is the only party, which has nationalism at the core of its ideology,” adds the 62-year-old, as he takes a break from his gruelling campaign calendar for a visit to Kanthalpara, where the family’s ancestral house – the birthplace of the author of great novels like Durgeshnandini, Kapalkundala, Devi Chaudhurani, and, of course, Anandamath, which was based on the Sanyasi Rebellion and the Great Bengal Famine of 1770s – still stands. The expansive verandah, elegant columns and sprawling courtyard radiate the grace of a typical 19th-century affluent Bengali household. “I don’t understand the peculiar ideology of the Congress. The Trinamool Congress has no ideology at all.”

Modi, in November 2025, accused the country’s first prime minister, Jawaharlal Nehru, of succumbing to pressure from Muhammad Ali Jinnah’s Muslim League, truncating Vande Mataram – first published in Bangadarshan in 1875 and later inserted in Anandamath in 1882 – for rendition at the Indian National Congress’s session in Faizpur in Maharashtra in 1937.

“The stanzas paying tribute to Goddesses Durga, Lakshmi, and Saraswati were removed to appease a particular community,” Sumitro, a former bureaucrat in the state government, says, echoing the BJP’s allegations against the Congress. “Had Rishi Bankim been alive in 1947, he would have vehemently opposed the Partition of India.” He thanks ‘Modi Ji’ for mandating the full rendition of Vande Mataram. “The prime minister has finally given Bankim Chandra Chattopadhyay and his tribute to Bharat Mata the long overdue recognition and respect”.

The West Bengal government has turned Rishi Bankim’s ancestral house at Kanthalpara in Naihati into a centre for research on his life and works. The adjacent ‘baithakkhana’ (parlour) has also been turned into a museum.

Sumitro, who now runs a business, is pulling out all the stops to project himself as a ‘bhumiputra’ (son of the soil) of Naihati and to foil the Trinamool Congress’s bid to brand him as a ‘bahiragoto’ (outsider).

He is not only invoking the legacy of the Sahitya Samrat, but also seeking the blessings of Boro Maa, the tutelary deity of Naihati, and of course, Lord Ram.

In November 2025, even as Modi attacked the Congress on Vande Mataram, the BJP’s de facto chief ministerial candidate in West Bengal, Suvendu Adhikari, did his bit to train the same gun on the TMC. He, along with Sumitro, turned up near the famous Coffee House in College Street in Kolkata and tried to enter a house, where Rishi Bankim had died in 1894 and which was later turned into a library. He could not enter as the gate was locked.

He then accused the TMC government of stopping him from celebrating the 150th anniversary of Vande Mataram and of neglecting the heritage of its composer.

The ruling TMC, around the same time, staged a protest in front of Jorasanko Thakurbari – the birthplace and the ancestral residence of poet philosopher Rabindranath Tagore – against a comment of the BJP’s Lok Sabha member Visheshwar Hegde Kageri, who was elected from the Uttar Kannada parliamentary constituency of Karnataka. Kageri had said that Vande Mataram should have been the national anthem instead of Jana Gana Mana, which, according to him, had been composed by Tagore to welcome the high officials of the British Raj. The TMC cashed in on the comment by the BJP leader and accused the saffron party of insulting Gurudev.

The TMC has once again fielded Sanat Dey, a member of the outgoing assembly, in Naihati, which has been a stronghold for Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee’s party since 2011. He reels off his record in office – bringing in more doctors at the local government hospital, securing an additional escalator at the railway station, and drawing in industries to generate jobs – before moving on to his plans ahead and, finally, the welfare schemes rolled out by Mamata. On Bankim Chandra Chattopadhyay’s death anniversary last Wednesday, he, too, garlanded the statue of the doyen at the local municipal building.

No one can ignore the legacy of Rishi Bankim in Naihati. But can it alone help win the battle of ballots? “We take pride in the fact that we live in the birthplace of Bankim Chandra Chattopadhyay. But this is unlikely to be an issue in elections,” Arup Bhattacharya, a painter and a retired teacher, says. “We will vote for someone who is known to us, who helps us in our hour of need.” Asim Das Majumdar, who runs a roadside tea stall, echoes: “People vote for a candidate judging the development works that he, or the party he represents, has done.”

Bankim Babu is the latest find in the BJP’s search for an icon – beyond its own Bharatiya Jana Sangh founder Syama Prasad Mookerjee – to appropriate in West Bengal. The party, which often finds itself at the receiving end of the TMC’s nativist campaign, has in the past sought to leverage the legacy of Netaji Subhas Chandra Bose. It not only inducted Chandra Kumar Bose, the grandnephew of the Indian National Army’s commander-in-chief, into the party and appointed him its vice president, but also fielded him in the 2016 assembly elections and the 2021 parliamentary polls in West Bengal as its candidate. He got drubbed in both the elections and finally quit the party in 2023. He recently called his decision to join the BJP “a historic blunder” in a post on X.

Sumitro, however, is betting on a better future with the BJP.