For voters in West Bengal required to choose a winning side and therefore a losing side, neither of which is satisfactory, the best bet lies in applying the minimax strategy to determining how the competition can be made to work to their individual advantage.

In Game Theory, the minimax strategy, of always minimising the maximum possible loss which can result from a choice that a player makes, seems to be the natural choice for aggrieved voters.

The 2026 state assembly election will be bipolar. What constitutes the polarities in voter perception will determine the outcome. The BJP continues to nurse the hope that it will succeed in ousting Mamata Banerjee; she, on the other hand, is on edge.

Unhappy with the Trinamool Congress for different and contradictory reasons that can be clubbed together as anti-incumbency, but equally disapproving of the Bharatiya Janata Party’s centralised narrative of communal polarisation based on aggressive Hindu majoritarianism and  belligerent demonisation of Muslims, as “ghuspaithiyas,” illegal “infiltrators” and “Rohingya,” as well as a homogenising promise of a double-engine government, voters have to decide which is the lesser evil.

Anti-incumbency is common to the TMC  and the BJP. The TMC has been in power in Bengal for 15 years and the BJP has been in power at the Union for 12 years. Its political strategy is as familiar as the Trinamool Congress’s; the double engine model and the guarantees of sabka saath sabka vikas (with all, development for all) is well understood by Bengal’s voters. As politically conscious voters, who migrate out of the state, the political shenanigans in Maharashtra, where the BJP split Sharad Pawar’s Nationalist Congress Party and Uddhav Thackeray’s Shiv Sena are understood by Bengali voters.

Both ends of the Bengali domestic diaspora, the educated employed and the low-skilled or unskilled workers engaged in daily wage labour and gig work, know what happens around the country. Therefore, the BJP is not the new and shining alternative that it seemed to be in the 2019 Lok Sabha election, when its vote share zoomed 40.6% and there was a wave of support for the energetic and charismatic Narendra Modi.

In 2026, the BJP in West Bengal is almost as familiar as the Congress or the Trinamool Congress. Narendra Modi is also the leader who blundered badly by cat-calling Mamata Banerjee – “Didi, o Didi” – in 2021. The party and its leadership is known, therefore, when ex-state president Dilip Ghosh nominated this time from the Kharagpur Sadar seat warns that “she” will not get away with displaying bandages and plaster casts and she will be incapacitated by her injuries, no one in West Bengal makes the mistake of pretending not knowing who his target is.

The promise of a flood of development after the BJP is elected, a double engine sarkar is installed and Banerjee ousted is a threat. Anti-establishment is how the Bengalis see themselves; from the time they decided that being compradors to the East India Company and British imperialism was a bad idea down to Mamata Banerjee, there is a shared pride in the history and its continuing practice of radicalism, of stepping out of line, trashing rigid conventions and relishing not being conservative. Netaji Subhas Chandra Bose battled Mahatma Gandhi when he became president of the Congress in........

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