West Bengal Assembly to see reduced Muslim representation due to systematic marginalisation

As West Bengal braces for the final phase of the 2026 Assembly election, Muslim representation in the Assembly could witness its lowest level in over two decades, despite the community constituting more than 27 per cent of the total population, owing to prevailing electoral-demographic redrawing measures such as delimitation and, particularly, the SIR, which contracted the electorate from 766 lakh to 675 lakh and disproportionately affected Muslim voters.

The impending decline marks a dramatic reversal from the trajectory witnessed during the earlier decades of Bengal’s electoral politics. During the final years of the Left Front regime in 2006, the Assembly had 46 Muslim legislators, while the advent of the Trinamool Congress (TMC) government in 2011 elevated the figure to 59 before it marginally declined to 56 in 2016, according to The Wire.

However, the fiercely polarised 2021 election, shaped by the BJP’s aggressive ascendancy as the principal opposition force, reduced Muslim representation to 42 MLAs, including 41 from the TMC and one from the Indian Secular Front (ISF), The Wire report said.

Political observers contend that the structural ceiling has tightened further in 2026 because the BJP has once again excluded Muslims entirely from its list of nominees, thereby ensuring that every BJP victory automatically forecloses the possibility of Muslim representation from that constituency.

The ruling TMC, apparently recalibrating its electoral arithmetic amid intensifying communal polarisation, has also fielded only 47 Muslim candidates, constituting barely 16.15 per cent of its nominations and remaining significantly below the community’s demographic share.

Although the Congress, Left Front and ISF have fielded comparatively larger proportions of Muslim candidates, 71, 51 and 20, respectively, their resurgence in minority-dominated pockets has generated anxieties regarding vote fragmentation, particularly in constituencies where triangular contests could inadvertently facilitate BJP victories.

The electoral contraction has been compounded by the SIR exercise, which resulted in the deletion of nearly 9.1 million voters, amounting to around 12 per cent of the state’s electorate.

Demographic assessments indicate that Muslims, while constituting just over 27 per cent of the population, accounted for nearly 34 per cent of the deleted voters, with more than 31 lakh Muslim names reportedly removed from the rolls. Of the 27.16 lakh voters placed under adjudication, estimates suggest that a substantial majority belonged to the Muslim community.

Further diminishing Muslim electoral mobility is the delimitation matrix, under which several constituencies with sizeable Muslim populations have been reserved for Scheduled Caste candidates, thereby preventing Muslims from contesting in regions where they remain numerically influential.

The looming representational collapse has unfolded alongside enduring socio-economic deprivation, which sharply contradicts the BJP’s longstanding narrative of “minority appeasement”.

The Sachar Committee Report of 2006 had revealed that Muslims accounted for merely 4.2 per cent of state employment despite forming more than a quarter of the population, while subsequent studies documented persistent poverty, negligible public-sector representation and chronic exclusion from higher administrative positions.

The crisis deepened further after the Calcutta High Court, in May 2024, invalidated the OBC status of 77 communities, most of them Muslim, thereby jeopardising nearly five lakh certificates and dismantling one of the few institutional pathways through which sections of the community had accessed education and formal employment.