In West Bengal’s election season, candidates are finding that the fastest route to the voters’ mind may well be through the voter’s kitchen, courtyard and tunnel, as speeches in the new politics of intimacy give way to spatulas and manifestos to buckets of water.
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One candidate washed dishes in a village house, another carried buckets of water for an elderly woman, and a third shaved voters in a roadside saloon.
Across the state, campaigning has become less a contest of speech and more a contest of political intimacy, with each candidate trying to send the same message: “I’m not above you, I’m one of you.”
In Hooghly’s Goghat, TMC candidate Nirmal Maji, a Calcutta resident, seems determined not to let the familiar taunts of “outsiders” become a political liability.
In one house he picked up a ladle and stirred a pot on the stove. In another, he sat on the floor and shared a simple meal of dal, fish curry and rice with his family.
“I’m trying to prove to people that I’m not here as a guest. I want to live among them, eat with them and share their lives,” said Mr. Maji.
Nearby, in Pursurah, TMC candidate Partha Hazari found his campaign briefly turned into a chore.
Inside the polling station, where women were grinding spices into ‘shil-nora’ (a grinding tool made of stones), Mr. Hazari rolled up his sleeves and joined in. In another, he crouched next to a tub of dishes, helping to wash plates and pots while party members outside raised slogans.
He was recently seen in the voters’ kitchen rolling out rotis on a clay oven after learning that the household had run out of cooking gas.
“People don’t want leaders who only come with microphones and leave with garlands. They want to know if we understand their daily struggles,” Mr Hazari said.
Elsewhere, in Arambagh, TMC candidate Mita Bag entered a roadside restaurant, fried fritters in bubbling oil, wrapped them in paper packets and even sold a few to customers.
If TMC leaders entered kitchens, BJP candidates went to saloons, fields and village lanes.
In Narayangarh, BJP candidate Ramaprasad Giri entered a local saloon during the campaign. The customer was waiting for a shave. A few minutes later the candidate himself picked up the razor and began to shave the man’s beard.
In Durgapur West, BJP candidate Lakshman Ghorui found that political outreach can also start with a bucket.
He was walking through Nishanhat and saw an elderly woman trying to get water from a roadside tap. Ghorui stopped and filled two buckets himself and carried them to her house.
“I saw an elderly woman from a distance carrying water. At that moment I thought politics could wait and I helped her out,” he said.
In Pursurah, BJP candidate Biman Ghosh took his campaign to the fields where he joined farmers in ploughing.
In a state where politicians are often accused of simply plowing through promises, this was literally plowing the field.
In Chatna, BJP candidate Satyanarayan Mukhopadhyay matched Mita Bag almost item for item by frying fritters at a roadside restaurant.
Now, the campaign trail seems to have become a contest not only of ideology, but also of culinary skill.
For decades, communists in West Bengal prided themselves on ideology, atheism and a carefully maintained distance from overt displays of religion.
Today, with their electoral fortunes reduced to what rivals deride as “zero”, even comrades seem willing to seek divine intervention.
CPI(M) candidate Kaltan Dasgupta in Panihati started his campaign not with a Marxist slogan but with prayers at the Chaitanya temple at Mahotsabtala ghat.
Old-timers still remember the debate when Left Front leader and then Minister of State late Subhas Chakraborty visited the Tarapith temple or when veteran leader Rezzak Mollah went on Haj. Chakraborty then summed up West Bengal’s enduring political divide in a line that has since become folklore: “First Mohammad, then Marx. Mr. Dasgupta insists that the party is merely adapting to social reality.”
“We’re not abandoning ideology. But if people start their day with faith, we can’t start our campaign by pretending faith doesn’t exist,” he said.
A Calcutta University sociologist said the new style of campaigning reflected a deeper change in West Bengal’s political culture.
“The old politics of distance is disappearing. It used to be that leaders stood on the podium and voters below. Now candidates are entering kitchens, courtyards and temples as voters increasingly judge authenticity through intimacy,” he said.
“This is retail politics at its purest. Visuals of a candidate washing dishes or carrying water can travel much further on social media than a manifesto. In West Bengal today, optics often reach voters before ideology,” said a Kolkata-based political analyst.
Within hours, many of these campaign images had leaked out of the constituency and taken on a second life online.
Photos of candidates washing dishes, carrying buckets or frying fritters have sparked a flood of memes and sarcastic captions. One post described the campaign as “Bengal’s Got Talent: Election Special”. Another joked that after roads, jobs and water, the parties may soon be competing over who makes better fritters.
A picture of a CPI(M) candidate praying in a temple invited particularly sharp barbs with one meme quipping: “From Das Kapital to Dasavatara.” Yet, despite all the ridicule, the parties understand that in the electoral theater of West Bengal, campaigning is no longer fought only with manifestos and speeches.
It is also fought with ladles, razors, buckets and “white balls”. And when the votes are tallied, the winner may be the candidate who looked the least like a politician.
