A New Political Era Begins in West Bengal : The Long Shadows Of The New Chief Minister of Bengal

Varanasi Subrahmanyam, Countercurrents, May 10, 2026, Kolkata : As Suvendu Adhikari and his ministers took the oath at Brigade Parade Ground yesterday, West Bengal turned a page. Home to over 100 million people, sharing a long, porous border with Bangladesh, and carrying one of the most plural and syncretic cultural histories in South Asia, this state now belongs to a man with a long record. Not a mysterious one. A documented one. Let us examine two facets of it.

The Dead Men in His Wake 

There is a pattern that follows Suvendu Adhikari through his political life. Not a metaphor. Not an allegation. A pattern of deaths—real, proximate, unresolved.

The first was Pradip Jha. On August 3, 2013, Jha—personal assistant to then-TMC MP Suvendu Adhikari, the man who managed his office in Haldia and handled his MP funds—was found unconscious on Strand Road in Kolkata. He was 42. Pavement dwellers nearby could not say when or how he had arrived there. The post-mortem cited excessive alcohol consumption and asphyxiation. But his family cried murder. Personal items were missing. The state of his clothing raised questions. An investigation was launched. Then, quietly, nothing happened. No perpetrator. No conclusion. The case simply closed.

The second was Subhabrata Chakraborty. In October 2018, Chakraborty—a State Armed Police officer who had served as Suvendu Adhikari’s personal bodyguard for over seven years—was found with a gunshot wound to his head inside a police barrack in Kanthi, Purba Medinipur. The barrack stood directly opposite Adhikari’s residence. It was initially ruled a suicide. But Chakraborty’s wife, Suparna, refused to accept it. She accused Suvendu Adhikari directly, pointing the finger at the man her husband had protected for nearly a decade. The case was transferred to the CID. Suicide was ruled out. The case was reopened in 2021, after Adhikari had already crossed over to the BJP. It remains unresolved to this day.

Think about what that means: a bodyguard who spent seven years inside Adhikari’s innermost circle—knowing his movements, his visitors, his secrets—dead, steps from his principal’s front door, with a bullet in his head.

The third was Pulak Lahiri. In 2021, in the charged aftermath of the Nandigram contest—one of the most bitterly disputed electoral battles in recent Bengali political memory—Lahiri, Adhikari’s trusted driver and close associate, was found hanging. He had reportedly served as one of Adhikari’s counting agents at Nandigram on election day. Almost immediately, family members and political rivals raised questions. Some alleged he was preparing to reveal sensitive information about what had transpired at the counting hall. That allegation was never proven. But it was also never refuted. And Lahiri never had a chance to speak.

The fourth, and most recent, is Chandranath Rath. A former Indian Air Force officer, Rath was Adhikari’s personal secretary—his most trusted operational aide. On May 6, 2026, just two days after the BJP’s historic Bengal victory, he was chased down in Madhyamgram in North 24 Parganas by motorcycle-borne gunmen and shot dead. An eyewitness described it as professional, pre-planned, and clinical.

Four men. Four deaths. Thirteen years. Not one arrest. Not one named perpetrator. Not one investigation brought to a conclusion.

Pradip Jha in 2013. Subhabrata Chakraborty in 2018. Pulak Lahiri in 2021. Chandranath Rath in 2026.

This is not a record. It is a question—and it is a question that now hangs, unanswered, over the man taking oath as the Chief Minister of West Bengal. Bengal’s journalists, its civil society, and its citizens must ask it plainly: who is killing people close to Suvendu Adhikari? Why has the impunity been total? And now that he commands the police, the administration, and the machinery of government, will the truth be buried with him at its helm?

The Ideological Foundations

If the deaths are the shadow, the words are the substance. And the words are not hidden. They are timestamped, on camera, and reported by visual and print media. Suvendu Adhikari has constructed his ideology in plain sight.

He crossed from the TMC to the BJP in December 2020. Within months, standing on the same Nandigram soil where he had once built his political identity alongside Mamata Banerjee, he declared his new creed without flinching.

After winning Nandigram in 2021, he told the press: “I will work for the Hindus of Nandigram.” Not for its people. For its Hindus. He explained why: all Muslim votes had gone to the TMC. This was not a dog whistle. It was a declaration of governance by religion, by a man who would become Leader of the Opposition and is now Chief Minister.

Then, in March 2025, from the floor of the West Bengal Assembly itself, he escalated. He declared that if the BJP came to power, Muslim MLAs would be physically thrown out of the House. “In 2026, all TMC MLAs will be Muslim. No TMC MLA will be Hindu. We will throw them out of the Assembly.” The Speaker sat in his chair. The cameras rolled. No FIR was registered. No action was taken.

On history and nomenclature, he has been equally unambiguous. Speaking to ANI in January 2023: “They (Mughals) killed so many Hindus and destroyed temples. All the places named after them should be identified and renamed. We will remove all British and Mughal names within a week if BJP comes to power in Bengal.” This is not reform. This is erasure—the systematic scrubbing of centuries of shared civilisation from the map of a state that was built, precisely, on that layered synthesis.

Then came Gaza.

In December 2025, Adhikari led a march to the Bangladesh Deputy High Commission in Kolkata in protest against the lynching of a Hindu garment worker, Dipu Das, in Bangladesh’s Mymensingh. The protest was legitimate. What followed was not. Standing before television cameras after the meeting, he said: “A lesson must be taught. Like Israel did in Gaza, India’s 100 crore Hindus—the government is working towards the welfare of Hindus. A lesson must be taught like India did to Pakistan during Operation Sindoor.”

Gaza. Where, by the time he spoke those words, over 70,000 Palestinians had been killed, entire cities reduced to rubble, and scholars across the world were using the word genocide. He offered it not as a warning. As a template.

The Trinamool Congress called it “naked hate speech”—“a bloodthirsty call for mass murder and ethnic cleansing.” They said he had “spewed genocidal bile” and called him “a Hitler in the making.” The UAPA was not invoked. No FIR was lodged. Adhikari was not arrested.

He stands in a recognisable line. In Assam, Hemant Biswa Sarma has said: “I would urge Assamese to learn from Israel—with Iran and Iraq as neighbours, Israel with a small population has become an impregnable society.” In Uttar Pradesh, Yogi Adityanath has deployed the bulldozer as both instrument and metaphor of governance against Muslim citizens. Now Bengal joins this constellation. These are not individual eccentrics—they are a network, a coordinated grammar of exclusion, in which invoking Israel’s bombardment of Gaza as governance inspiration has become a standard rhetorical move, and no consequences follow.

The man who made these speeches now holds the full power of government. He commands the police. He controls the administration. He decides who is investigated and who is not.

The Aftermath of the Election

On the night of May 4–5, as the scale of the BJP’s victory became clear, West Bengal did not celebrate. It bled.

At least four political workers were killed, party offices burned, a mosque vandalised, Muslim hawkers threatened and driven from their stalls, and students beaten with lathis—across Kolkata, Howrah, Birbhum, Murshidabad, Cooch Behar, and several other districts. TMC worker Abir Sheikh was hacked to death in Birbhum’s Nanoor. In Kolkata’s Beleghata, TMC worker Biswajit Pattanaik was found dead outside his home with severe injuries. TMC offices were ransacked in Panihati, Ghatal, Asansol, and Diamond Harbour.

In Kolkata’s New Market—the old cosmopolitan heart of the city—BJP workers arrived with bulldozers, threatening Muslim hawkers and telling traders that no one could do business there without the party’s permission. In Cooch Behar’s Dinhata, BJP workers set ablaze a sculpture of the Taj Mahal. And in Murshidabad’s Jiaganj—hometown of singer Arijit Singh—a decades-old statue of Lenin was smashed by a crowd carrying iron rods and hammers, “Jai Shri Ram” slogans rising through the night air. It happened in Tripura in 2018. Now it has come to Bengal.

A senior police officer confirmed four deaths and said one officer had been shot in the leg. Both sides blamed each other. The new Bengal had announced itself.

If this opening act signals anything, the promise of Viksit Bengal—developed Bengal—will be a mirage seen from behind a wall of fear, especially for minorities, for the opposition, and for anyone who asks too many questions. Suvendu Adhikari’s post-victory slogan was “Bhoy Out, Bhorsha In”—Fear Out, Trust In. The bitter irony writes itself: for Bengal’s minorities, the post-result violence delivered precisely the opposite message.

The four dead aides have no answers left to give. The speeches are already in the archive. The violence is already in the record.

History is watching. And in Bengal, it has a long memory.

Lest our memory is not lost in the labyrinth of information, I have to add this.

A decade ago in Howrah, Modi had thundered that the Narada tapes had exposed Bengal’s corrupt political elite “caught on camera taking bundles of cash.” He was dramatically explaining to the audience about the sting operation on Suvendu Adhikari. Today, one of the very faces once held up as a symbol of that corruption stands rehabilitated at the centre of power. History is being repeated from Assam to the neighbouring Bengal.

(Source: https://countercurrents.org/2026/05/the-long-shadows-of-the-new-chief-minister-of-bengal/)