Opinion | Lalu Raj Vs Mamata Regime: Why West Bengal Is More Worrying Than ’90s Bihar

Mamata's TMC has not just efficiently usurped RJD’s reputation for historic misgovernance, but it has emerged as a bigger threat to India’s wellbeing than Bihar under Lalu ever was

For years, Lalu Prasad Yadav’s term as chief minister of Bihar has been the gold standard of misrule in India. Both ordinary citizens and political analysts readily cited the lore of daily kidnapping, wanton caste violence, murders, rapes, and crippling economic downturn to describe the Bihar of the 1990s and early 2000s under Lalu and his wife Rabri (widely considered a puppet while her husband ruled).

Mamata Banerjee’s TMC has not just efficiently usurped the RJD’s reputation for historic misgovernance, but today it has emerged as a bigger threat to India’s wellbeing than Bihar under Lalu ever was.

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PM Narendra Modi was right when he described TMC rule in West Bengal as “Maha Jungle Raj", while Lalu’s days will have to now be content with the “Jungle Raj" epithet. The rot under Mamata Banerjee is arguably more damaging in structural and long-term ways.

First is the institutional capture and culture of political violence. TMC has institutionalised political violence and “syndicate raj". Cow, coal, sand, transport, real estate, education, health, food, infrastructure, disaster relief…it is hard to name even one aspect of life in West Bengal that has not been systematically handed over to the mafia. The scale of political murders and intimidation, affecting even panchayat and municipal elections, is greater than what India witnessed even in Lalu’s Bihar.

On economic parameters, Mamata’s government, with state GDP growth of 6-7 per cent, fares better than Lalu’s, which was 2-4 per cent. While Bihar was the poster-child of BIMARU states and per capita income even took a dive, West Bengal has done modestly better.

But the flight of industry and investment has been phenomenal under Mamata, starting with Tata taking its Nano factory from Singur to Gujarat’s Sanand.

Unlike Bihar, which was already economically broke, West Bengal started from a stronger industrial base, but 6,688 companies have relocated their registered offices from West Bengal to other Indian states between April 1, 2011, and March 31, 2025—a massive opportunity cost.

Under Mamata Banerjee, the state’s debt has touched Rs 7 lakh crore.

West Bengal’s once-famous education system has deteriorated because of politicisation and violence on campuses right from the Left era. No better from Lalu’s Bihar.

The collapse of law and order in West Bengal has surpassed the Lalu-era violence. NCRB records show West Bengal registered 114 political murders between 2011 and 2020, ranking it second highest in India, behind Bihar. After the 2019 Lok Sabha elections, the BJP claimed that over 300 of its members were killed in political violence. This was followed by the notorious 2021 post-poll massacre and 2023 Panchayat election killings.

While ’90s Bihar consistently ranked among the worst states in violent crime (dacoity, kidnapping, murder, caste-based massacres), West Bengal has repeatedly ranked first or second nationally. In 2023, it had one of the lowest conviction rates for crimes against women, averaging 3.7–5 per cent between 2017 and 2023.

But what truly makes the West Bengal case a much bigger national headache is a massive demographic shift because of illegal immigration, a threat to national security from terror groups and hostile agencies from across the border, and deep communal fault lines.

Infiltration from Bangladesh has altered demographics in the border districts like Malda, Murshidabad, Dakshin Dinajpur, and South 24 Parganas. West Bengal now leads in crimes by foreigners, severely undermining national security.

TMC’s stubborn reluctance to grant fencing land to the BSF and repeated arrest of ISIS, Al Qaeda, and Bangladeshi terror modules in West Bengal point to political support for jihadi activities because of vote bank considerations. In Bihar, Islamic terrorism did not find this kind of fertile ground.

All this makes West Bengal under Mamata a bigger, festering wound and challenge to national security than the basket case that Bihar had been under Lalu. And it makes the Bengal forthcoming election that much more critical for not just the eastern region but for India in general.

Abhijit Majumder is the author of the book ‘India’s New Right’. Views expressed in the above piece are personal and solely those of the author. They do not necessarily reflect News18’s views.

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