The biggest and decisive day of the 2026 Bengal elections is Friday, April 29th. Voting will take place in 142 seats across the state in the second and final phase. This phase will determine whether Mamata Banerjee will retain power and score a ‘four-point victory’, or whether the BJP will breach this ‘red and green’ bastion of South Bengal and reach the state secretariat, ‘Nabanna’, for the first time. Voting in districts like Kolkata, Howrah, Hooghly, Nadia, North 24 Parganas, South 24 Parganas, and Purba Bardhaman will truly determine the future of Bengal.
Statistics show that the Trinamool Congress has always held the upper hand in these 142 seats in South Bengal. In the 2021 elections, the TMC won a landslide victory in 123 of these 142 seats. The BJP won only 18 seats, and the ISF won only 1 seat.
The number of seats for the Assembly elections in various districts is as follows:
33 seats in North 24 Parganas,31 seats in South 24 Parganas,18 seats in Hooghly, 17 seats in Nadia, 16 seats in Howrah,16 seats in Purba Bardhaman, 7 seats in North Kolkata, and 4 seats in South Kolkata, totaling 142 Assembly seats.
In this second phase, voting will also take place in Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee’s home constituency, Bhawanipur. In Bhawanipur, Mamata Banerjee is contesting against BJP’s firebrand leader Suvendu Adhikari. In the 2021 elections, Suvendu Adhikari defeated Mamata Banerjee in Nandigram by 1956 votes.
The biggest and most sensitive issue in this election has been the Special Intensive Revision (SIR) of voter lists. According to data, millions of names have been removed from these key districts. This could impact the election results.
North 24 Parganas saw the highest number of deletions, at 1.26 million.South 24 Parganas saw 1.091 million names removed from the voter list.6.97 million names were removed from Kolkata, 600,000 from Howrah, and nearly 900,000 from Hooghly-Nadiya.Opposition parties are calling it rigging, while the administration is calling it a list purification process.
BJP strategists believe that while they have a strong hold in North Bengal, their dream of power will remain unfulfilled unless they perform well in the urban and rural belts of South Bengal. The BJP leader says that change will begin from this “battlefield.” On the other hand, the TMC claims that they have already crossed the 100 mark in the first phase of 152 seats and that the second phase of voting will lead them to a two-thirds majority.
A record 93.19 percent voter turnout was recorded in the first phase on April 23. Tight security arrangements have been made for the April 29th elections. Central forces have been heavily deployed in Kolkata and surrounding districts.