How competitive faith politics is recasting Bengal's 2026 poll battle

As West Bengal heads into an election year, a spate of temple-mosque announcements, scripture spectacles and date-sensitive symbolism is pushing the state’s politics into unfamiliar territory, sharpening communal polarisation in a borderland shaped by partition memories, demographic anxieties, and a coexistence periodically tested by political mobilisation.

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From bordering Murshidabad district to the planned township of Salt Lake, on the eastern fringes of Kolkata, faith has emerged as the most audible idiom of political mobilisation, often drowning out conversations on migration, jobs, prices and governance, as rival players test how far religious assertion can stretch Bengal’s electoral grammar ahead of the assembly polls.

‘The immediate spark came December 6, which marks the anniversary of the Babri Masjid demolition.

‘Suspended TMC MLA Humayun Kabir pressed ahead with laying the foundation stone of a mosque “modelled on the original Babri structure” in Murshidabad’s Rejinagar, under unprecedented security cover.

Kabir argued that the political moment itself had shifted.