Post-Poll Violence and the Spatial Politics of Power: Reflections on West Bengal in India's 2026 State Elections

Abstract

The 2026 round of state elections in India—covering Assam, Kerala, Tamil Nadu, West Bengal and the union territory of Puducherry—produced one of the most consequential realignments in the country's recent electoral history, including the Bharatiya Janata Party's (BJP) first-ever victory in West Bengal after fourteen years of Trinamool Congress (TMC) rule. Yet West Bengal once again distinguished itself in a less celebrated register: it was the only one of the five polities to descend into significant post-poll violence. This editorial situates that violence within a spatial and cultural reading of electoral power. Drawing on comparative evidence from the 2026 verdicts, it argues that post-poll violence in West Bengal is neither an incidental excess nor the property of any single party, but a recurring symptom of a political order in which territorial control over neighbourhoods, booths, and local institutions is the substance of power itself. The reversal of partisan roles between 2021 and 2026—the TMC now occupying the position of the aggrieved—exposes the systemic, place-based logic of this violence. The editorial also flags the "administrative" disenfranchisement entailed in the Special Intensive Revision (SIR) of electoral rolls, and the federal anxieties accompanying a more centralised political map. It calls for scholarship that treats electoral violence as a geography to be mapped rather than a scandal to be deplored.

Keywords

Post-Poll Violence, 2026 State Elections, Electoral Geography, Party-Society, Political Violence, West Bengal, Disenfranchisement, Federalism, Spatial Politics, India

Author Biography

Rituparna Bhattacharyya

Rituparna Bhattacharyya is a human geographer whose work spans the GeoHumanities, with a particular focus on gender, inequality, poverty, violence, the Sustainable Development Goals, and development in the Global South. She earned her PhD from Newcastle University in 2009, with a thesis on the changing status and role of Indian middle-class women in higher education, having previously completed an MA in Human Geography at Banaras Hindu University, where she graduated First Class First. Her career began in the classroom in the late 1990s, and over more than two decades she has combined teaching and research across universities in South Asia and the UK, drawing on feminist, postcolonial, and intersectional frameworks alongside mixed qualitative and quantitative methods including GIS.

In April 2025 she was elected a Fellow of the Royal Geographical Society (with the Institute of British Geographers), where she also serves as a committee member and, for 2025–2028, as Conference Coordinator of the Gender and Feminist Geographies Research Group. She is a Senior Fellow of Advance HE and currently a Visiting Professor at the University of Science and Technology, Meghalaya, having recently held an Adjunct Professorship at IIT Guwahati. Among her newest distinctions, she received the Editor of Distinction Award 2026 from Springer Nature, was recognised in May 2026 for her editorial service to Humanities and Social Sciences Communications, and has been named convener of a proposed UNESCO Chair at Cotton University, Assam.

Her editorial portfolio continues to expand. Since 2024, she has been Series Editor of the Gender and Violence series at Routledge, Taylor & Francis, and she serves as Associate Editor of the Journal of Diversity and Inclusion Research (Wiley) and on the editorial board of Springer Nature's Humanities and Social Sciences Communications. She remains editor-in-chief of Space and Culture, India, the SCOPUS-indexed, open-access journal she founded in 2013.

Her recent scholarship reflects a growing engagement with genocide, borderlands, and structural violence in South Asia. With a Google Scholar record of more than 1,400 citations and an h-index of 20, and reviewing work across more than thirty peer-reviewed journals, she also continues charitable capacity-building work in remote parts of India. Besides, she also writes popular/topical articles for India Today NE magazine, Niyamiya Barta (a local Assamese daily) and The Assam Tribune.

A few other publications include:

Bhattacharyya, Rituparna, Sarma, Dhurjjati & Parasar, Siddhartha Sunom (2026). Xenophobia, Necrospace and Genocide in Bangladesh: Unveiling Histories of Violence and Structural Erasure. National Identities. DOI - 10.1080/14608944.2026.2657466 (Taylor & Francis)

Bhattacharjee, P., Das, T.K. & Bhattacharyya, R. (2026). Stigma-Driven Trauma and Coping Strategies of Women Experiencing Infertility in Bangladesh: A Qualitative Exploration. Sexuality & Culture. https://doi.org/10.1007/s12119-026-10568-9 (Springer Nature)

Bhattacharyya, R. (2024). Genocides and Xenophobia in South Asia and Beyond: A Transdisciplinary Perspective on Known, Lesser-known and Unknown Crime of Crimes. New York and London: Routledge, Taylor and Francis. DOI: 10.4324/9781003205470. ISBN: 978-1-032-02091-4 (hbk), ISBN: 978-1-032-07122-0 (pbk) and ISBN: 978-1-003-20547-0 (ebk). https://www.taylorfrancis.com/books/edit/10.4324/9781003205470/genocides-xenophobia-south-asia-beyond-rituparna-bhattacharyya

Bhattacharyya, R. (2023). North East India Through the Ages: A Transdisciplinary Perspective on Prehistory, History, and Oral History. London and New York: Routledge, Taylor and Francis. DOI: 10.4324/9781003157816; hard cover ISBN: 978-0-367-74431-1; paperback ISBN: 978-0-367-74435-9; ebook ISBN: 978-1-003-15781-6, https://www.taylorfrancis.com/books/edit/10.4324/9781003157816/northeast-india-ages-rituparna-bhattacharyya

Anand, S., Das, M., Bhattacharyya, R., and Singh, RB. (2023). Sustainable Development Goals in Northeast India: Challenges and Achievements. International Geographical Union (IGU) Series: Advances in Geographical and Environmental Sciences, Springer Nature https://link.springer.com/book/9789811964770

Pulla, V., Bhattacharyya, R., & Bhatt Sanjai (2020). Discrimination, Challenge, and Response: People of North East India. London: Palgrave Macmillan, DOI:10.1007/978-3-030-46251-2; eBook ISBN:978-3-030-46251-2; Hardcover ISBN:978-3-030-46250-5 https://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/978-3-030-46251-2

Das, T., Bhattacharyya, R., Alam, F., and Parvin, A. (2020). In-depth Semi-structured Interviewing: Researching Domestic Violence as a Public Health Issue in Bangladesh. SAGE Research Methods Cases Medicine & Health, Disciplines: Public Health. Online ISBN: 9781529719840, DOI: https://dx.doi.org/10.4135/9781529719840

Bhattacharyya, R., Sarma, P.K. & Das, T.K. (2023). Mass exodus of India’s internal migrant labourers during the first phase of COVID-19: a critical analysis. SN Social Sciences. 3, 108. https://doi.org/10.1007/s43545-023-00691-x

Das, T.K., Bhattacharyya, R. & Sarma, P.K. (2022). Revisiting geographies of nationalism and national identity in Bangladesh. GeoJournal. 87, 1099–1120. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10708-020-10305-1 (Springer)

Bhattacharyya, R. (2019). Symbolic Violence and Misrecognition: Scripting Gender among Middle-class Women, India. Society and Culture in South Asia. 5(1), 19-46. DOI: 10.1177/2393861718787870 (Sage)

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