West Bengal Assembly Elections 2026 | Roll revision reverses drift in TMC’s minority votes, Kabir’s Babri Mosque gambit falters

Stacks of bricks, heaps of sand and stone chips, and a few makeshift tea-and-snacks shops to cater to the construction workers as well as the curious visitors make the plot by the National Highway 12 stand out. The piece of land in Beldanga, Murshidabad, is the site where Humayun Kabir has promised to build a replica of the Babri Masjid.

Humayun, who was suspended from the Trinamool Congress on December 4, laid the foundation stone of the replica just two days later, commemorating the 33rd anniversary of the demolition of the original Babri Masjid in Ayodhya, Uttar Pradesh, in 1992. The place was then teeming with people, many carrying bricks for the construction of the shrine. It was an event that catapulted the 63-year-old legislator from Bharatpur in Murshidabad to national headlines and many speculated that it would have a significant impact on the politics of poll-bound West Bengal, particularly on the choices of the Muslims, who make up nearly 27 per cent of the population and are perceived as a key voting bloc in over 110 of the state’s 294 assembly constituencies.

But, just four months later, the Aam Janata Unnayan Party (AJUP) – the political party Humayun, 63, floated a couple of weeks after being thrown out of the TMC – is in a state of disarray.

Tahir Khan, the AJUP’s candidate at Kulti in Asansol, quit the party, joined the TMC and stepped aside from the contest on Saturday. So did Mohammed Abu Siddique Lashkar, whom the AJUP had fielded at Magrahat in South 24 Parganas, and Khobayeb Amin, who was the party’s bet at Bharatpur in Murshidabad, recently. Tohidul Rahman, the party’s vice president and a candidate at Manikchowk in Malda, defected to the Congress on Sunday, urging the people not to vote for him. Four more AJUP candidates – Rahul Ghosh of Raniganj, Rubia Begum of Durgapur East, Adwaita Das of Barabani, and Juved Sheikh of Pandabeshwar – joined the TMC on Tuesday.

The AJUP had announced a list of 182 candidates on March 18. But how many of them are left in the fray? There is no official word from the party.

“The crowd on both sides of the road here reflects the overwhelming support we are receiving from common people, who see in us a prospective alternative to both the TMC and the Bharatiya Janata Party,” Kabir says as he addresses a rally at Mohammadpur after a roadshow through Rejinagar, one of the two constituencies he, himself, is contesting from. “Not only the Muslims, but also all the downtrodden people, exploited by the TMC and the BJP, are supporting us.”

He shuttles between Rejinagar and Naoda, his second constituency, to seek votes for himself, and Kabir can hardly spare time now to visit the site of the mosque, but he says that he is keeping a tab on the construction works.

Kabir had defected from the Congress to the TMC in 2013, quit the TMC in 2016, and joined the BJP in 2018, before returning to the TMC in 2021, only to be expelled after he made his plan to build a replica of the Babri Masjid public late last year.

The TMC accused him of working for the BJP and dividing the Muslims to help the saffron party advance its agenda of Hindutva.

The BJP, on the other hand, alleged that his expulsion from the TMC was staged and Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee’s party still had a tacit understanding with the AJUP.

Rekibuddin and Jabbar, who run small businesses at Khanakul in Hooghly, came to see the site of the proposed mosque in Beldanga. “We are going to Baharampur and have taken a stopover here to see the site. We heard about Humayun Kabir’s plan to build the mosque,” says Rekibuddin. Jabbar adds: “It is a good initiative. We heard that a hospital and a school would also be built here”. Will they vote for the AJUP candidate in their constituency? “Some people in our neighbourhood initially thought so. But, after so many genuine voters were deleted from the electoral rolls during the SIR (Special Intensive Revision of the electoral rolls), everyone knows that this is not the time to let anyone fragment our votes and end up helping the BJP,” says Jabbar. Rekibuddin is more candid: “Didi (Mamata) may have failed to deliver what we expected from her. But she is fighting to restore the voting rights of the people deleted from the rolls. People must rally behind her”.

The roll revision and the BJP’s promise to introduce the Uniform Civil Code in West Bengal, apparently reversed the drift of the religious minority community’s votes from the TMC, which has been in power in the state since 2011.

Abhishek Banerjee, the TMC general secretary, recently said at a rally in Murshidabad that even a single vote for a party other than Mamata Banerjee’s would help the BJP.

Kabir suffered a jolt after the TMC on April 9 released a video of a “sting operation”, which allegedly exposed a purported Rs 1000 crore deal between him and the BJP to help unseat Mamata Banerjee’s party from power in West Bengal. The All India Majlis-e-Ittehadul Muslimeen (AIMIM) quickly severed its ties with the AJUP, although Kabir and Asaduddin Owaisi had just a few days back jointly slammed Mamata Banerjee at a news conference in Kolkata, alleging that her TMC government had always seen the Muslims of West Bengal as a vote bank, but did nothing for the socio-economic uplift of the community. They had also addressed an AJUP-AIMIM rally in Naoda.

“I have not launched the AJUP relying on the AIMIM. Our fight for the common people will continue,” says Kabir. He first claimed that the video was generated with the use of Artificial Intelligence. Prime Minister Narendra Modi, himself, too, appeared to have lent credence to the AJUP chairman’s allegation, as he said in a BJP rally that the TMC had got scared anticipating defeat, and that was why it started making videos using AI. But Kabir later admitted that the video was real but accused the TMC of editing 51 minutes of footage into a 19-minute-long one just to malign him. He moved the Calcutta High Court seeking a probe into the video.

But, beyond his own constituencies, Kabir is getting a limited response. He had to cancel a rally at Margram in the Hansan assembly constituency of neighbouring Birbhum recently, because when he reached, only his candidate, Syed Uz Zaman, and a few others were waiting for him.

“Mamata Didi wants her associate Humayun Kabir to build a Babri Masjid in Bengal,” Union Home Minister Amit Shah said at a BJP rally in Salboni in Paschim Medinipur district on Tuesday. “Didi, listen carefully. Bengal is in India. We will never allow a Babri Masjid to be built in Bengal”.

The saffron party is clearly not yet done milking Kabir’s Babri Mosque plan for all it’s worth.