Bengal polls: Politicians switch parties here because the system consistently rewards leverage over loyalty

As West Bengal goes to vote today in the first of a 2-phased election, political loyalty won't be tested as much as its price revealed. Over successive election cycles, movement of politicians between TMC and BJP has become so predictable that calling it 'defection' would be overstating things. More accurately, it's inventory management.

The numbers are clear. Of the 148 defectors from TMC who received BJP tickets ahead of the 2021 elections, only 6 (about 4%) won. The real question, then, is not why politicians keep switching despite such poor odds, but who profits from this 'inventory management'?

The 2021 assembly elections produced a significant defection wave. Suvendu Adhikari, Rajib Banerjee and Mukul Roy, all former TMC heavyweights, joined BJP wrapped in the language of conscience and governance failure. BJP celebrated each arrival as a moral endorsement. The results were less flattering.


Banerjee, who had won Domjur seat by more than 1 lakh votes in the previous election, lost by more than 42,000 votes. Roy won - then quietly returned to TMC before the year was out.

The 2026 cycle has not resolved this pattern. Former TMC MLA Arghya Roy Pradhan, a 2-term legislator, officially joined BJP, with leader of opposition Adhikari present to welcome him. Pradhan, who had been denied a party ticket in 2021, this year cited corruption against a fellow TMC member as his reason for leaving. The underlying trigger - ticket denial - is quite familiar.

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While debates around SIR have created a charged political atmosphere, structure of this election's defection wave is the same as in 2021.

Once you strip away the rhetoric, motivations behind these switches are remarkably consistent. Alignment of some TMC leaders with BJP seems to have been influenced, in part, by ongoing investigations into cases such as Narada and Saradha by central agencies. The rising influence of Abhishek Banerjee within TMC was also cited as a major factor driving dissatisfaction among several senior party figures, who eventually defected ahead of the 2021 elections.

And then there is ticket denial, blunt and consistently underreported, which remains among the most common triggers for defection. What is notably absent from all public discussions is 'ideology'. Every public defection is a performance. The real conversation happened weeks earlier, behind closed doors, with no cameras present.

It's easy to frame parties as passive recipients of opportunistic politicians. Evidence suggests a different conclusion. BJP's over-reliance on TMC defectors badly backfired in 2021, alienating a section of its core support base in the process. The internal discontent was hard to contain. Former governor Tathagata Roy publicly described them as 'garbage' that should be 'immediately eliminated'.

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Roy had also warned that BJP's state unit would soon face two rounds of departure: first, those who had come from TMC; second, long-standing party workers who felt sidelined. His prediction proved right within months. TMC, for its part, found that losing its most entrenched and controversy-laden figures created room to rebuild under a cleaner organisational image.

Hence, defectors are not accidents within party systems. They are instruments acquired, deployed and set aside when no longer useful.

The 2026 cycle has added a new dimension that deserves scrutiny. Voter list management, long a background issue in Bengal elections, has moved to the centre of political calculations. West Bengal's loss of electors following SIR stands at 11.6%, placing it among the highest in the country for electoral roll reductions among major states.

SIR's adjudication phase has caused significant impact in districts with significant minority communities. In practical terms, this situation possibly creates an environment where some party switches in 2026 appear to be driven not by policy disagreement, but by a calculation about which party's ground machinery can better protect a leader's voter base from being removed from the rolls. That is a qualitatively different kind of defection from the opportunism of earlier cycles, and one that raises serious questions about the integrity of the electoral process itself.

Bengal's defection politics does not prove that its democracy is broken. It's a sign that its political system is working precisely as its most powerful players have designed it to. To understand why defections keep happening, the answer lies not in any single election but in structural incentives that make switching rational.

When various factors like perceived influence of central agencies, internal party processes regarding candidate selection, and administration of electoral rolls can influence the political landscape, the calculus of loyalty shifts away from the voter and toward the party machinery.

Politicians don't switch because they are uniquely cynical. They switch because the system consistently rewards leverage over loyalty, and punishes those who mistake party membership for security. The party machine, whichever one most efficiently cycles through political capital, wins each time. In West Bengal, loyalty was never the currency. It was always the asking price.

The writer is an electoral geographer specialising in geospatial analytics