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Kolkata: In West Bengal’s 2026 assembly election, few seats carry the symbolic weight of Bhabanipur.

This south Kolkata constituency is Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee’s political home turf and also the seat most closely tied to her personal and electoral journey. Banerjee has a six-decade association with Bhabanipur. She grew up here, studied here and even worked part-time at a milk booth in her early years. She has contested twice from this assembly seat. Bhabanipur is also part of the Kolkata Dakshin Lok Sabha constituency, from where she has been elected five times.

That legacy is now under direct challenge, with Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) Leader of the Opposition in assembly and Banerjee’s closest confidant-turned-foe, Suvendu Adhikari taking her on. Bhabanipur has thus become one of the prestige battles of the election, a contest being read as a measure of Banerjee’s personal hold over urban Bengal and of the BJP’s ability to turn symbolic advances into electoral breakthroughs. This is also the second direct contest between the two leaders. In 2021, Adhikari defeated Banerjee in Nandigram. Banerjee later returned to the assembly by winning the Bhabanipur by-election, enabling her to continue as chief minister for a third consecutive term.

Known for years as “Mini India,” Bhabanipur is one of Kolkata’s most socially layered constituencies. Around 76% of the electorate is Hindu. Of this, about 42% are Bengali-speaking and 34% non-Bengali-speaking. Minority voters, mostly Muslims, make up around 24%.

Bengali middle-class residents remain the dominant social bloc, but the constituency also includes sizeable Gujarati, Punjabi, Sikh, Marwari and Bihari populations. Old mansions, slum clusters, temple roads, business districts and new high-rises together shape the constituency’s complex political mood. 

Bhabanipur comprises eight wards of the Kolkata Municipal Corporation – 63, 70, 71, 72, 73, 74, 77 and 82. Since the 2014 Lok Sabha elections, the BJP has steadily emerged as a significant force here. In 2024, the Trinamool Congress even trailed in Ward 73, where both Mamata Banerjee and party general secretary Abhishek Banerjee are registered voters, a telling sign of how far the contest has tightened.

For TMC, however, Bhabanipur remains the constituency of belonging. Banerjee’s image as the local leader who rose from this very neighbourhood........

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