Opening Salvo for 2026

Amit Shah's Bengal and Tamil Nadu tour signals BJP's early election mode for 2026, deploying contrasting strategies across two of India's toughest political battlegrounds

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The BJP, under Amit Shah's command, has chosen to fight early—and on its own carefully chosen terrain

In the volatile world of Indian politics, timing is everything.

While most political parties are still calibrating their compasses for the future, Union Home Minister Amit Shah has already sounded the war cry for the 2026 Assembly elections. Between December 29, 2025, and January 5, 2026, Shah undertook a whirlwind tour of West Bengal and Tamil Nadu— two of the BJP's toughest ideological battlegrounds.

To the casual observer, these were routine organisational visits. A closer examination of the itinerary, the rhetoric, and the internal directives, however, reveals a meticulously calibrated blueprint for electoral domination— one that eyes a “two-thirds majority” in West Bengal and an “outright victory” in Tamil Nadu. Shah is not merely visiting these states; he is fundamentally re-engineering the BJP's approach to its most formidable challenges, marking the Party's formal transition into full election mode for the 2026 Assembly polls. While the ambition remains identical, the strategies deployed in Kolkata and Chennai are strikingly distinct.

In West Bengal, Shah’s December visit to Kolkata functioned as an unofficial campaign launch. The intensity of his schedule—marathon meetings with party leaders, elected representatives, and RSS functionaries—reflected a party seeking to translate its expanding vote share into a governing majority.