Opinion | How Muslim Voters In Bengal Will Shape The 2026 Assembly Poll Outcome

On December 6, 2025, the 33rd anniversary of the demolition of Babri Masjid, a suspended Trinamool Congress MLA named Humayun Kabir laid the foundation stone of a mosque modelled on the iconic structure in Murshidabad district. It was an act calculated for maximum political resonance, and it worked. Within weeks, the West Bengal Police had attached properties worth Rs 10 crore linked to Kabir's family in a narcotics case, the Trinamool had expelled him, and a new political outfit - the Janata Unnayan Party (JUP) - had been born. The 2026 assembly election battle for Bengal's Muslim vote has officially begun.

The Demographic Arithmetic

To understand why this matters, start with the numbers. Muslims constitute approximately 27% of West Bengal's population as per the 2011 census - a figure the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) now claims may be closer to 30% or higher given illegal immigration from Bangladesh over the intervening decade. Three districts - Malda, Murshidabad, and Uttar Dinajpur - have Muslim-majority populations of 50% or above. Two more, South 24 Parganas and Birbhum, hover above 35%. Spread across these geographies are 89 assembly seats where the Muslim population exceeds 30%, and 112 seats where it exceeds 25%.

In the 2021 assembly elections, the Trinamool Congress won 87 of those 89 seats - a near-perfect sweep. Of the 112 Muslim-influenced seats, Trinamool captured 106, leaving the BJP with just five. The BJP's strike rate in constituencies with more than 30% Muslim population was nearly zero, with the party managing to win just one seat. These seats, in effect, acted as a structural wall the party simply could not breach.

The Vote Consolidation Story

According to Axis My India exit poll data from 2021, approximately 75% of Muslim voters backed the Trinamool. By the 2024 Lok Sabha elections, that figure had risen to 83%. Data from The Centre for the Study of Developing Societies (CSDS) suggests that concerns around the Citizenship (Amendment) Act, the National Register of Citizens (NRC) debate, and a broader sense of political vulnerability drove Muslim voters closer to Mamata Banerjee's fold rather than away from it. Will the current SIR exercise further consolidate this segment?

This consolidation has a mirror image on the other side. In constituencies with a Muslim population of up to 10%, the BJP managed a 42% strike rate in 2021 (winning 33 of the 77 seats) - its only truly competitive zone. As the Muslim share of a constituency's population rose, the BJP's performance fell in almost perfect inverse proportion, dropping to 25% in seats with 20-30% Muslim population, 8% in 40-50% Muslim population seats, and 0% beyond that threshold. 

The Structural Math of Victory

Herein lies the paradox at the heart of Bengal's politics. A simple majority in the 294-seat assembly requires 148 seats. With 106 of the 112 Muslim-influenced seats already in its column, the Trinamool needs to win just 42 more from the remaining 182 Hindu-majority constituencies. In 2021, it won 109 of those seats - a 60% strike rate - giving it the comfortable 215-seat majority it achieved. The BJP, by contrast, won 72 Hindu-majority seats (40% strike rate) but was effectively locked out of the Muslim heartland.

For the BJP to win Bengal, it cannot simply consolidate Hindu votes in Hindu-majority seats - it has already done that in its competitive zones. What it needs to do is either dramatically expand its Hindu-majority seat tally or, more dauntingly, find a way to crack the Muslim fortress. Neither prospect looks easy.

Enter Humayun Kabir

That is the context in which Humayun Kabir's Babri Masjid gambit must be understood. The Bharatpur MLA, who has a complicated political history - he contested the 2019 Lok Sabha elections on a BJP ticket before returning to Trinamool orbit - now claims he is building an alternative pole of Muslim political representation. His Janata Unnayan Party has announced plans to contest 182 assembly seats in 2026.

The Trinamool's response has been instructive. Rather than attempting dialogue or accommodation, the party suspended Kabir and publicly distanced itself from the mosque project. Police action against his family followed swiftly. Kabir, predictably, called it political victimisation. The BJP, meanwhile, is playing both sides - describing Kabir as the Trinamool's 'B-team' even as the latter accuses him of having been the BJP's man all along. The mutual accusations suggest neither party fully controls the narrative.

Dissatisfaction In The Trinamool Fortress

VoteVibe's tracking data from late 2025 introduces an element of caution into any confident forecast for the Trinamool Congress. While 54% of Muslim respondents still want Mamata Banerjee as Chief Minister - a commanding majority - 26% rate her government's performance as poor or very poor. Some 16% remain undecided. In a bloc this large, even modest erosion translates into significant seat implications.

On Humayun Kabir specifically, the polling is revealing. Sixteen per cent believe he will cut into the Trinamool's Muslim votes - a meaningful share. But 34% think he is a BJP project, and 28% believe he is a covert operation designed by the Trinamool Congress to serve some strategic purpose. The near-equal split between the latter two categories suggests a community that is politically sophisticated, somewhat suspicious, and not easily swayed by personality politics alone.

The Bihar-AIMIM Comparison - and Why It Doesn't Quite Apply

BJP strategists watching Kabir's emergence inevitably think of Bihar's AIMIM experiment. In the 2020 Bihar elections, Asaduddin Owaisi's party won five seats in Muslim-concentration areas of Seemanchal and was widely credited - or blamed, if you ask some - with splitting Muslim votes in ways that cost the Grand Alliance several constituencies. His party repeated the same in 2025. Could Kabir play a similar spoiler role in Bengal?

The geography argues against a direct comparison. In Bihar, Muslim voters were concentrated in a contiguous belt of border districts, making it possible to target a critical mass through a single regional campaign; 27% of the population lives in four districts of Seemanchal. In Bengal, on the other hand, while the Muslim population is substantial, it is also far more dispersed - spread across urban pockets in Kolkata, rural belts in the north, and coastal zones in the south. The top five Muslim-concentration districts account for roughly 90 seats, but Muslims also constitute meaningful minorities in dozens of other constituencies across the state. This dispersal makes a Kabir-led spoiler strategy significantly harder to execute at scale. 

What 2026 Comes Down To

The battle lines are becoming clear. The Trinamool Congress will attempt to present itself as the only credible shield for Muslim interests against what it characterises as the BJP's 'divisive' agenda - a framing that worked spectacularly both in 2021 and 2024. The challenge is to do this while managing internal dissent, addressing the 26% dissatisfaction in its Muslim base, and preventing Kabir from peeling off enough votes in Murshidabad and adjacent districts to alter outcomes in closely contested seats.

The BJP's challenge is existential in a different way. Without a structural breakthrough in Muslim-influenced seats - or a dramatic collapse in Kabir's popularity - the party is mathematically dependent on running the table in Hindu-majority constituencies, a task it fell short of even in 2021, when the 'Modi wave' was high. The BJP needs to win 148 out of 209 seats where the Muslim population is less than 30%. That would mean a strike rate of 72%. A daunting task indeed.

Disclaimer: These are the personal opinions of the author