Waving a big Catla fish in his hands, Sharadwat Mukherjee went door to door canvassing for votes before Thursday’s election to the state legislature in the eastern Indian state of West Bengal.
Mukherjee is a candidate from Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), which rules nationally but has never come to power in the state, which has a greater population than Germany: more than 90 million people.
When he folds his hands to greet voters, the Catla just swings with a hook in its mouth. The big question: Can the fish also swing the election’s outcome?
Bengalis’ love for fish is legendary — on both sides of the border, in India and in Bangladesh. So much so that when a student-led uprising led to the ouster of then-Bangladesh Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina, some of the protesters who broke into her residence after she fled were seen raiding her refrigerator and walking away with fish.
But as West Bengal votes for its next government, fish has now leapt from kitchen slabs to the campaign trail, as leaders cosy up to voters in a variety of ways — and in some cases try to distance themselves from suspicions that their wins could hit the Bengali diet adversely.
What’s happening in the West Bengal election?
Nearly 68 million people in West Bengal are expected to vote for their candidate of choice on April 23 and 29, to elect 294 lawmakers to the state assembly.
The results will be declared on May 4 in the crucial state vote, which the Hindu majoritarian BJP has never governed.
A revision of the electoral list, which controversially swept away a total of 9.1 million names from the register before polling, and has been criticised for disenfranchising minorities, was among the major polling issues. Some 2.7 million people have challenged their expulsions.
Another is identity politics.
On the campaign trail, in rallies, and in interviews, the chief minister of Bengal, Mamata Banerjee, a firebrand, centrist regional leader — who has been sometimes touted as a contender for Modi’s job in New Delhi, if the opposition were to win — has doubled down on identity politics to corner the BJP, analysts say.
BJP-led governments in several states have imposed bans or restrictions on the sale of meat. Far-right mobs have carried out lynchings of Muslims in BJP-ruled states over accusations that they were transporting beef.
Banerjee, who is seeking a fourth consecutive term, has time and again warned that if the BJP were to come to power, they would “ban fish, meat, and even eggs” — effectively labelling them as outsiders, unaware of Bengali culture. The BJP has rejected these allegations.
Biswanath Chakraborty, a psephologist and political analyst in West Bengal who has authored several books on voting behaviour, told Al Jazeera that the whole issue surrounding fish had been “constructed by Mamata Banerjee.”
“For long, she has peddled that fish is parallel to Bengali politics,” he said. “In election campaigning, every issue is constructed, and Mamata is the champion of that.”
Chakraborty argued that by fiercely pushing back against these allegations, the BJP had ended up helping the governing party in Bengal make sure the debate over fish remained a campaign highlight with voters.
“They [the BJP] are entering, or rather trapped, into the discourse set by Mamata,” the analyst said.
Why fish, though?
“Fish is very crucial in Bengal, very crucial,” said Utsa Ray, an assistant professor at Jadavpur University, in West Bengal’s capital Kolkata. She also authored a 2015 book on Bengal’s culinary evolution in colonial India, titled Culinary Culture in Colonial India: A Cosmopolitan Platter and the Middle-Class.
“First of all, due to Bengal’s geographical location itself – along the Bay of Bengal – [and as] a place situated near rivers and streams, fish have been the most available item,” she told Al Jazeera.
Fish has also been an integral part of many rituals in Bengal on auspicious days for both Hindus and Muslims, Ray said, adding, however, that there were sects of people in Bengal who refrain from eating fish.
A 2024 study found that nearly 65 percent of people in West Bengal consume fish weekly.
Against that backdrop, Ray told Al Jazeera that Banerjee’s party was looking to leverage “regional identity or the Bengali identity”.
Banojyotsna Lahiri, a social activist and voter in West Bengal, described the BJP’s response, with candidates like Mukherjee campaigning with fish, as a “gimmick”.
“In Bengal, [the BJP] have suddenly realised that they appear as aliens with their vegetarian posturing because both fish and meat are integral to the Bengal culinary choices, caste or religion notwithstanding,” she told Al Jazeera. ”
What’s up with the BJP and food choices?
In the run-up to the voting on Thursday, the BJP rushed to find a senior leader who could eat a fish in front of the cameras. They finally managed to get Anurag Thakur, a member of parliament from Himachal Pradesh, to do that on Tuesday.
“Questions of what food people will eat, especially non-vegetarian [food], have been associated with the BJP’s politics to impose restrictions and dictate food options,” said Neelanjan Sircar, a senior visiting fellow at the think tank Centre for Policy Research, in Delhi.
The BJP has been dictating food choices in northern India’s Hindi-speaking belt, with its “hyper masculine, Hindutva, and vegetarianism,” said Ray. “There have been cases of lynching for eating non-vegetarian food.”
However, that falls flat in Benga.
Still, both Sircar and Ray agreed that the display of fish on the campaign trail was a novelty — even in the often-bizarre world of Indian politics.
“Creating these new images for the BJP is important,” said Sircar. “So, to create another image in voters’ minds leads to these outlandish displays.”