We had walked into a village in Jalpaiguri tucked between the Jaldhaka river and the Sonakhalo forest in North Bengal. Before we could speak, a woman asked us, “Are you from I-PAC?”
The question was unhesitating. It was also the most precise diagnosis of West Bengal’s contemporary politics. She did not ask what I-PAC was saying, or whether we knew anyone there. She asked whether we were from it. Confronted with outsiders showing up in a remote village to ask political questions, the most plausible explanation for her was that we belonged to a political consultancy.
That misidentification tells something fundamental about how parties interact with voters. It would not have been possible five years ago. It is possible now because the political consultancy has acquired an organisational density and ground presence in West Bengal that has made it indistinguishable with — and in the everyday cognition of voters, possibly more substantial than — the party itself.
What is happening in Bengal cuts against the conventional account of party decline in democracies. Peter Mair’s Ruling the Void described the slow hollowing-out of European mass parties as their organisational base eroded. Bengal is not that. The Trinamool Congress’s local organisation, by all available evidence, remains substantial. Cadres are present at the booth and the para (neighbourhood). The machine has not disappeared but has been functionally repurposed, and a parallel informational and mobilisational infrastructure built alongside it.
The starting point for understanding this is the welfare architecture. Dwaipayan Bhattacharyya, in his account of Bengal’s “party-society,” traced how the Left Front’s organisational form had become woven into the texture of everyday life — a system in which the local party was the medium through which claims on the state were made and adjudicated. The TMC inherited this expectation in 2011 and elaborated it through its first decade. But the elaboration sat on top of a substantive shift in the form of welfare. As cash transfers under Lakshmir Bhandar, Kanyashree, and the various direct-benefit programmes became increasingly universal, the local party functionary lost the principal source of leverage the older party-society had given him: meaningful discretion over who received what. When the rule is universal, the cadre cannot give differentially.
What the cadre retains is the power of inclusion onto and exclusion from the rolls, and the power of policing participation. In the slum bylanes of Titagarh, just outside north Kolkata, a female resident who works in the local hospital said that the local party machine knew which households did not vote for the TMC, and that during the recent Special Intensive Revision of electoral rolls, the support extended to those households in navigating documentation was withdrawn, while it was provided to others across religious lines without distinction. The discrimination was not communal. It was based on the household’s perceived political loyalty, and it operated through the gate rather than through the gift. The machine has shifted from distribution to gatekeeping.
This shift carries a political cost that is now, in 2026, becoming visible. In 2021, across Hooghly, Nadia, and the North Bengal districts, female respondents repeatedly identified themselves with the leadership in the most personal terms — “we all have Mamata in us,” one woman told us — while reporting, often in the same breath, friction with the local cadre over cut-money, dada-giri, and the differential delivery of benefits. The pattern was a politics in which the leadership remained popular precisely as the local machine became resented, because the machine’s power was now experienced as extractive and disciplinary rather than provisioning.
The leadership’s response to this pathology has not been internal organisational reform. It has been the construction of a parallel structure. Didi Ke Bolo (Tell the elder sister) routes citizen complaints directly to a central office, bypassing the local cadre that is the source of much of the grievance. Duare Sarkar (government at your doorstep) brings the State to the citizen’s doorstep without requiring the local functionary to mediate access. The political consultancy has been the operational vehicle for much of this. It would be empirically careless to attribute these interventions to a single firm; what can be said with confidence is that the leadership has come to rely on a parallel infrastructure, separate from the party’s own cadre, to learn what is happening on the ground and to communicate with voters.
The Bengal case is one important instance of a broader phenomenon in which leaderships, faced with organisational pathologies they find too costly to address directly, defer the problem by constructing parallel structures alongside the party. The cost of deferral is that the underlying problem persists. The 2021 refrain – that “Didi is good, but everyone else under her is bad” – is returning to the leadership in 2026 as a settled anti-incumbency that the parallel structures cannot dissolve, because they were never designed to repair the relationship between the cadre and the citizen.
The other major party faces an analytically related problem on different ground. Tariq Thachil’s Elite Parties, Poor Voters documented how the BJP solved its organisational deficit among the rural poor in the Hindi heartland by relying on Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh-affiliated service organisations that built party-adjacent presence without requiring formal cadre. In Bengal, the Sangh’s social embedding has historically been thin, and the substitute that worked in Madhya Pradesh or Uttar Pradesh has not been available. What the BJP has done in response, holding the central government, is to substitute federal institutions for the organisational depth it has not built: central armed police deployments, the scheduling decisions of the Election Commission, the recently completed SIR, and, in the previous period, an expansive interpretation of the governor’s office.
These are not equivalent to a private consultancy, and the democratic costs are sharper. But the underlying logic is the same. Two leaderships, faced with organisational problems they have chosen not to solve from within, have built parallel structures alongside the party.
The woman in North Bengal was not making a complaint. She was reading the system she lives in correctly. The leadership of her state has built a parallel structure that talks to her more directly than her local party does. The question it raises is whether parties that defer their internal problems by building structures alongside themselves can do so indefinitely, or whether the unaddressed pathology eventually returns as electoral cost. West Bengal in 2026 is, in its own way, a test of that question.
(Bhanu Joshi is visiting assistant professor at Ashoka University; Neelanjan Sircar is an associate professor at Ahmedabad University. The views expressed are personal.)
www.hindustantimes.com
#Party #left #building #rise #parallel #politics #Bengal
