West Bengal Chief Minister and Trinamool Congress chief Mamata Banerjee has been on an overdrive for about a year, to announce and inaugurate temples in various corners of the state, amid BJP allegations that she is "appeasing" the minority Muslim community.
Banerjee -- a devotee of goddess Kali -- holds an annual Kali Puja for decades at her home, barely a couple of kilometers away from the famous Kali temple in Kalighat. But she never played up her personal religious credentials in the political arena before the BJP landed in a big way on Bengal's battleground in 2019.
Now she seems to have decided to play up the Bengali-Hindu sentiment on the political stage to counter the BJP brand of "Hindutva" in a bipolar political state.
Read: BJP's "Fake Hindu" Jibe At Mamata Banerjee As Bengal Gets A Piece Of Puri
She had trodden this path for the 2021 assembly polls, reciting from the "Chandi" (invocation of Durga) on stage at election campaigns, to counter BJP's Hindutva push with "Jai Sri Ram" slogans and Hanuman Jayanti rallies that lack a Bengali cultural identity to it.
Now, in the run up to the 2026 assembly polls where she is seeking a fourth straight term as Chief Minister, she has decided to showcase her temple building spree and development of traditional Hindu religious sites and events.
The first big splash came last year when her government built a Jagannath temple in Digha, modelled after the famous temple in Puri in Odisha.
Inaugurated on April 30 by the chief minister, the temple was also the first of its kind since the roughly Rs 250-crore project was implemented by the state government's housing corporation (HIDCO), sparking a controversy on whether public money should be used to build religious structures.
Read: Bengal Polls Next Year, Digha Jagannath Temple Trinamool's Hindu Outreach
The footfall since has been overwhelming - a factor the ruling Trinamool Congress thinks could be to the party's advantage. Digha is in East Midnapore district, where BJP's Suvendu Adhikari - who defeated Mamata from Nandigram, in 2021, after shifting to the BJP -- holds a lot of cards.
In December 2025, a grand Mahakal temple in Siliguri has been announced for which a trust has been formed. The Chief Minister also inaugurated a bridge project in Gangasagar that will connect the little islands at the delta where pilgrims gather for the auspicious Makar Sankranti in January.
The foundation stone for a Rs 262 crore "Durga Angan" project in New Town, Kolkata, was also laid by the Chief Minister, who at the time had dismissed any allegation of appeasement politics, saying it was a tribute to UNESCO's recognition of Durga Puja as a cultural heritage. The 17-acre complex will have temples, museums and cultural spaces.
Read: Jagannath, Durga, Mahakal: BJP Fumes Over Mamata Banerjee's Temple Projects
If the Durga Angan and Gangasagar projects are large scale, Banerjee also inaugurated a local temple of goddess Bagalamukhi in Kalighat, close to her home. A new temple complex has come up where a non-descript tiny temple of the goddess stood, and mostly devotees from the neighborhood offered prayers. Banerjee is a worshipper of "Ma Bagala" since childhood.
While the Chief Minister has plied the state's 27 per cent minority Muslim population with government schemes and stipends for minority students and developing religious sites, she is being extra cautious this round to establish that it is not by overlooking the interests of the majority Hindu community.
To prove the point, she has raised her government's grants to the 40,000 Durga Puja committees across the state from Rs 85,000 to Rs 1.10 lakh recently. Durga Puja is the state's biggest religious-cultural festival.
As a political veteran, Banerjee is reaching out to her core Bengali-Hindu voters amid attempts by her rivals -- outfits like Humayun Kabir's JUP or the ISF or even Assaduddin Owasi's AIMIM -- to split the minority votes. The election results in May will tell whether the move worked.
(The author is a Guest Contributor)
Disclaimer: These are the personal opinions of the author
