West Bengal Assembly Elections 2026 | Cracking Mamata's loyal base: BJP ropes in protest figures, pledges higher payouts to woo women

The TMC on other hand, picked up on deleted names in SIR and alleged that the EC had used everyday realities of the lives of women – marriages and change of addresses and surnames – to place them in the 'under adjudication' category

Kolkata: “I am contesting the election so that Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee and her party can be ousted from power, and all women can feel safe in the state,” says Ratna Debnath, the mother of the young doctor, who was raped and murdered at the R G Kar Medical College and Hospital in Kolkata on August 9, 2024.

"The Trinamool Congress government must go, if people, particularly the women, have to live in West Bengal without fear,” says Rekha Patra, the face of the 2024 protest in Sandeshkhali near Sundarbans against the alleged atrocities by Sheikh Shahjahan, a now-incarcerated leader of Mamata Banerjee’s party, and his henchmen.

Ratna and Rekha are the Bharatiya Janata Party’s candidates in the Panihati and Hingalganj assembly constituencies in West Bengal for the assembly polls. Tumpa Kayal, who led the protest against the 2013 rape and murder of a college student at Kamduni in the North 24 Parganas district of the state, also joined the saffron party recently. “The victims of the crime against women never get justice under the TMC government. The criminals get off scot-free, thanks to their links with the ruling party itself,” says Kayal, who may also get a BJP ticket to join the electoral fray.

Tumpa, Rekha and Ratna are the faces of the BJP’s strategy to foreground the lived experiences of violence against women during the 15-year-long rule of the TMC in West Bengal. They are likely to campaign across the state, particularly in Bhabanipur, where the party’s de facto chief ministerial candidate, Suvendu Adhikari, is set to take on Mamata Banerjee herself.

This, however, is not the only arrow in the BJP’s quiver as it seeks to expand its appeal among the state’s female electorate – a constituency Mamata managed to consolidate as her party’s second most dependable support base after the religious minority community, thanks to her government’s welfare schemes, like ‘Kanyashree’ and ‘Lakshmir Bhandar’.

Just ahead of the elections, the TMC government raised the monthly payout rate under the ‘Lakshmir Bhandar’ scheme – from Rs 1,000 to Rs 1,500 for a woman in the general category and from Rs 1,200 to Rs 1,700 for each woman belonging to any of the Scheduled Castes and Tribes. The BJP had earlier mocked the ‘Lakshmir Bhandar’ and other such welfare schemes, terming the payouts as ‘alms’ or ‘doles’. But, after the schemes ensured the TMC’s landslide victory in the 2024 Lok Sabha polls, it had to change tack and promise to replace ‘Lakshmir Bhandar’ with a new ‘Annapurna’s Bhandar’ scheme with an even higher monthly payout rate of Rs 3000.

Mamata doesn’t have money, so Lakshmir Bhandar is going to stop,” Priyanka Tibrewal, the BJP’s candidate in Entally in Kolkata, tells a woman, while campaigning in her constituency. “Now, Modi Ji (Prime Minister Narendra Modi) will launch Annapurnar Bhandar and give you Rs 3000 every month.”

The new scheme is likely to feature among the promises the BJP will make in its Sankalpa Patra or manifesto for West Bengal. The manifesto, according to the party leaders, will also include promises to introduce measures to ensure the safety of women and to bring the criminals to justice expeditiously.

What also made the TMC worried about its support base among the women is the drop in the size of the female electorate after the Special Intensive Revision of the electoral rolls. The ruling party accused the Election Commission of wiping out nearly 57 lakh women from the lists of voters to ensure an edge for the BJP. “From 3.59 crore women voters in 2021 to 3.73 crore in 2024, and suddenly down to 3.16 crore in 2026. The timing is so convenient, isn’t it?” the TMC pointed out on Monday, calling it an “outright electoral fraud”. The party alleged that the EC had used everyday realities of the lives of women – marriages and change of addresses and surnames – to place them in the “under adjudication” category and strip them of their voting rights “in a calculated design to exclude”.

“The BJP fears Bengal’s women. It knows it cannot win if women vote freely. So, instead of fighting politically, it is manipulating administratively, using the system to silence those it cannot defeat,” alleged Mamata Banerjee’s party.