Culture Vulture

The tragedy of 2026 is that both the major parties have found it easier to fight over "culture" rather than "capital"

- ΑΝΙΜΙΚΗ CHAKRABARTY

IN the tea stalls of Kolkata and the parched fields of Paschim Medinipur, the air is thick with a peculiar, manufactured tension. As West Bengal hurtles toward another high-stakes assembly election, public discourse has been effectively hijacked by two polarising spectres: the Special Intensive Revision (SIR) of electoral rolls and the relentless, competitive communalism of the two primary political behemoths. One side warns of “infiltrators” and “demographic shifts”, while the other decries a “conspiracy to disenfranchise Bengali voters”. It is a masterful symphony of distraction. There is indeed a sense of worry for the All India Trinamool Congress (TMC) as the final list indicates that 1.21 crore electors—nearly one in six voters in the state—are currently categorised as either “deleted” or “under adjudication”. In about 234 constituencies, the volume of affected electors exceeds the most recent winning margin in the 2024 Lok Sabha election.

With increasing regionalisation, voters are made to believe that the most important form of political identification is a state-endorsed definition of regional identity, effectively merging religion, ethnicity, and language into a singular “culture war”. This strategy successfully breaks the link between voters and material issues like corruption, or industrial decline. Whichever party takes the oath of office in 2026 will find that while they won the war of identity, they are losing the war of existence. This is no longer about any specific regime; it is rather a structural failure of the state’s political economy that has mutated over decades into an inescapable trap.