This week on Hafta, Abhinandan Sekhri, Manisha Pande and Anand Vardhan are joined by senior journalist Aunindyo Chakravarty and The Hindu resident editor Varghese K George.

The panel begins with what the recent poll results mean and if traditional election analysis is even equipped to understand the playing field. 

Abhinandan challenged the narrative of governance and welfare, saying the centrepiece this time was the disenfranchisement of voters.

Aunindyo pointed to a hurdle in journalistic analysis. How the sheer pace of live election coverage makes it nearly impossible for reporters to actually sit with the numbers. “I don’t think reporters have the time or the training anymore.”

While most journalists predicted a Trinamool victory, academics forecast a BJP – citing his cousin and political scientist Dwaipayan Bhattacharya, who coined the term “party society” for West Bengal’s entrenched political structure.

Varghese K George zoomed out from Bengal to make a bigger argument about where Indian politics is heading. The older fault lines – caste, language, region – are giving way to a sharper Hindu-Muslim binary. In his reading, moves like the Citizenship Amendment Act and exercises like SIR are just attempts to formally draw the boundaries of who belongs to the political community. “Large numbers of people were struggling to prove that they are actually people,” George said.

The panel then talked about the communal undercurrent in Bengal. Aunindyo noted that the state has always been communal, though it was “hidden by many, many years of Left front government”. 

Manisha recalled the stark polarisation she witnessed on the ground. “I was very shocked by how polarised the state is... The communal polarisation is so in your face. In Nandigram, I remember bombs went off because in one booth complaints had come that a Muslim had come to vote in a Hindu booth.” 

Anand warned against simplistic issue-based election analysis. He said voters are not monolithic and often express many grievances that may not ultimately determine how they vote. “A voter has only one vote. The overwhelming factor decides,” he said, arguing that journalists often mistake what people articulate in interviews for what truly drives electoral behaviour.

All this and more.

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