Can We Ever Fix Bengal’s Violent Political Culture?

Landmine of Social Tension and History

On the night of 6 May 2026, a suspected sharpshooter from Ballia in Uttar Pradesh and two associates from Buxar in Bihar waited near the Doharia crossing in Madhyamgram, West Bengal, to assassinate Chandranath Rath.

Rath was Suvendu Adhikari’s closest personal aide during his opposition years, the kind of man who knew which phones to answer and which to ignore, which dinners to confirm and which to lose in transit.

‘Dada has requested you all to stay calm and not indulge in any violence,’ he had told the local cadre that afternoon. He was shot dead a few hours later.

This has been the situation so long in Bengal that the institutions meant to address it have long since accommodated themselves to its existence.

Below the excuse of ‘political violence’, sits a huge landmine of social tension, historical continuity and friction.

Perilous Record Of Violence

In one of his interviews, Pratim Ranjan Bose, a senior journalist and long-term observer of Bengal’s society and politics, said that in 2024, by official compilation, 64 per cent of all violence reported nationally came out of West Bengal. The most recent NCRB data places West Bengal first in the country in acid attacks, accounting for 27.5 per cent of the national total.

NCRB 2023 figures also show that Bengal recorded 34,691 crimes against women, placing it among the four highest-reporting states in India after Uttar Pradesh, Maharashtra and Rajasthan. In attempted rape cases, the state stood second nationally with 825 reported incidents, just behind Rajasthan’s 845.

Judicial outcomes are more alarming. Bengal’s conviction rate in crimes against women stood at barely 3.7 per cent, among the lowest in the country, meaning acquittal remained the overwhelmingly dominant outcome once trials concluded.

Kolkata may still report relatively low rape numbers compared to other metros, but some of the country’s most shocking recent crimes against women emerged from Bengal itself, from the RG Kar rape-murder case and the gangrape of a law student to assaults inside hospitals, molestation cases in moving vehicles and repeated allegations of politically protected intimidation networks operating in the state’s urban and peri-urban spaces.

A 2024 BBC documentary, Children of the Bombs, drawing on reports published in Anandabazar Patrika and Bartaman Patrika, reported that between 1996 and 2024 at least 565 children in Bengal were killed or injured by crude bombs abandoned after political clashes. One child every 18 days. That is the difference between Bengal and the older clichés associated with UP and Bihar, which have also produced violence at scale. Neither has produced the casualty type that depends on the casual leaving-around of military-grade improvised explosives in village fields.

The crude bomb answers a specific operational requirement of cheap, deniable, locally manufacturable, and producible at scale by the same panchayat networks that run welfare delivery.

That is why Bengal’s violence is not a misgovernance story in the way Bihar’s once was. It is a structural condition India has accepted…

المصدر: Swarajya