'Jhalmuri', 'Jhal', And 'Jhol': In West Bengal, Slogans Outlive Development

Rabindranath Tagore won the Nobel. Subhas Chandra Bose shook an empire. Satyajit Ray rewrote cinema. Jagadish Chandra Bose imagined wireless communication before the world had a word for it. For the better part of two centuries, if you wanted to find where India thought, created, argued, and led — you came to Bengal.West Bengal today has a per capita income 20 percent below the national average, a state debt of Rs 6,93,231.66 crore, and an economy that has grown slower than India's for a full decade, according to NITI Aayog's March 2025 State Report and the CAG's Budget Review of West Bengal 2024-25. Phase 1 of a two-phase election covering all 294 constituencies has been cast. Phase 2 votes on April 29. Every campaign has been jhalmuri (spicy

chat) politics — tossed together fast, spiced to sting, and consumed in the moment. The jhal (fiery) of rhetoric drowns out everything. The jhol (no real substance) of real governance – thin, watery, unexamined – is what remains when the rally ends and the votes are counted.Not one candidate, across any party, made the development gap the centre of their campaign.

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That silence is not accidental. It is the one thing Bengal's political class - across every party, every era, every promise of poribartan (change) - has always agreed on.

The Numbers Nobody Is Running On

The NITI Aayog's March 2025 report places West Bengal's real GSDP growth at an average of 4.3 per cent between 2012-13 and 2021-22, against a national average of 5.6 per cent. Held over a full decade, that is not underperformance. That is a structural condition. The state's share in national GDP has fallen from 6.8 per cent in 1990-91 to 5.8 per cent in 2021-22. In the 1960s, Bengal's per capita income was above the national average. States that Bengal once led economically have overtaken it. Nobody on any campaign stage has been asked to explain this and people challenging have not been asked how they plan to put this back on track. To every question, the answer is plain rhetoric and violence across parties and leaders. The CAG's budget review projects the state's revenue deficit at Rs 31,951.67 crore for 2024-25. Total state debt is projected to reach Rs 8.15 lakh crore by March 2027, with growing portions of expenditure absorbed by interest payments rather than capital investment. NITI Aayog data shows Bengal's credit-deposit ratio diverging from the national benchmark by 25 percentage points. Banks are sitting on money that businesses are not borrowing, because businesses are not confident enough to invest.

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Capital has been quietly voting against Bengal for thirty years. It just doesn't use a ballot box.

The Industry That Every Government Watched Leave

Bengal's industrial decline is the longest obituary in Indian state economic history — and it has more than one author.The state's share of national industrial output stood at 9.8 per cent in 1980-81. By 1997-98, it had fallen to 5 per cent — on the Left Front's watch, through 34 years of labour militancy, policy paralysis, and capital flight. The Left's land reforms were real. Its industrial record was a slow-motion abandonment.Then came Mamata Banerjee-led Trinamool Congress in 2011, promising reversal. Fourteen years later, the credit-deposit gap has not closed, and the industrial share has not recovered. The BJP has contested Bengal loudly across multiple cycles without producing a single costed economic programme specific to the state's deficits. Anti-incumbency is a campaign strategy, not a development plan. The Congress governed Bengal before all of them and left it structurally wounded before quietly exiting the conversation.

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Four parties. Four eras. Bengal is still waiting.

The Violence Nobody Fixes

The National Crime Records Bureau's Crime in India reports for 2010-2019 show West Bengal recording the highest absolute number of political murders in the country. Not the highest rate — the highest number. That decade spans the Left's final years, the TMC's consolidation, and the BJP's rise. No single party owns it. Every party active in Bengal during that period contributed the misery.Following the 2021 elections, the National Human Rights Commission — constituted by order of a five-judge bench of the Calcutta High Court — received 1,979 complaints covering over 15,000 victims. Its report described West Bengal as a manifestation of the "law of the ruler" and not the "rule of law"; documented murder, rape, displacement, and intimidation; and warned the trend may spread to other states. The state government called it vendetta. The opposition used it as ammunition. Neither proposed a structural fix. In the land of the man who wrote “Where The Mind Is Without Fear,” the mind remains – election after election – very much in fear.

The Narrative Machine

Bengal's one genuinely thriving industry is the manufacture of political narratives that substitute for governance.The Left ran on land reform rhetoric for two decades after the reform itself had run its course. By Singur and Nandigram, it had forgotten how to speak any other language. The TMC's welfare schemes – Lakshmir Bhandar, Kanyashree, and Swastha Sathi – deliver real transfers to real people. What they do not deliver is an answer to this: how does a state with Rs 8 lakh crore in projected debt and structurally low capital expenditure grow its way out? Welfare funded by borrowing is not development. It is survival dressed as progress. The BJP brought the loudest promises and the fewest specifics. 'Poribartan' has been its word for Bengal across multiple campaigns. After winning 77 seats against the TMC's 213 in 2021, it returned with the same word and no new plan.

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The most honest referendum on Bengal's political economy does not happen in a polling booth. Census data, analysed in peer-reviewed research published in Demography India, shows West Bengal recording more out-migrants than in-migrants across multiple census cycles. The young, the skilled, and the mobile — they have been leaving for Maharashtra, Delhi, and beyond for three decades. They are not making a political statement. They are making an economic one. And it reads the same way regardless of which party is in power.Phase 2 will be fought with the full intensity West Bengal brings to its politics — which has always been considerable and which has never once been directed at the compound failure the data describes.The jhalmuri is still being sold on the same street corners. The jhal is sharp enough to last another election cycle. The jhol runs deep enough to obscure everything underneath.The bill — for the debt, the industry that left, the investment that never came, the talent that migrated — will not go to any party headquarters. It will go, as it always has, to the people who stayed.