When Politics Enters the Pandal: Chorebagan Sarbojanin's 91st Year Gets Complicated
There's something almost poetic — painfully so — about how a Durga Puja season that started with such warmth and energy in North Kolkata has now hit a stretch of turbulence that nobody wanted.
If you've been following our ongoing coverage of Chorebagan Sarbojanin Durgotsav Samity's 91st year, you already know how it began — the grand Khuti Puja on 5th July, the theme reveal of "Akal Bodhon," the striking wall mural that instantly became the talk of the neighbourhood. For a few days, it felt like this puja was writing one of its best early chapters in nine decades.
Then the world outside the puja ground walked in, uninvited, as it tends to do.
First, Let's Understand the Context: A Bengal That Just Changed Its Government
To understand what has happened at Chorebagan, you first need to understand what happened to Bengal.
In the 2026 West Bengal Assembly elections, the BJP won a landslide victory, becoming the first right-wing party ever to be elected to rule in the state.The BJP won 207 of the 294 assembly seats with a vote share of 46 per cent, reducing the ruling Trinamool Congress to just 80 seats — a near-reversal of 2021, when the BJP won 77 seats and the TMC won 215.
This is not a minor political footnote. Political change in West Bengal occurs at long intervals, and this is the first time in nearly 50 years that the ruling party at the centre has also won in West Bengal. Suvendu Adhikari — the same person who inaugurated Chorebagan Sarbojanin's Khuti Puja — is now the Chief Minister of West Bengal.
In this completely transformed political landscape, every puja pandal, every neighbourhood committee, every cultural institution in Kolkata is navigating a new reality. Who runs the club? Who stands on which side? Who invited whom to the inauguration? Questions that once felt relatively unimportant have suddenly taken on a different weight.
Chorebagan Sarbojanin found itself at the centre of this new reality faster than anyone expected.
The Mural That Sparked It All
When the puja committee unveiled its wall painting on July 6 — depicting PM Narendra Modi offering aarti to Goddess Durga — the immediate reaction was one of admiration. The artwork was created to commemorate the Prime Minister's recent visit to the nearby Thanthania Kali Bari, which is at a five-minute walking distance from the puja courtyard. Secretary Pratyusha Banerjee expressed the wish for PM Modi to perform Durga Puja in Bengal in the future.
Banerjee said: "We hope that the Prime Minister, who is so religious, is seen at many religious places. He should come to Bengal this year at the time of Durga Puja, perform aarti for Mother Durga. Because we have never seen him in Bengal at the time of Durga Puja before. So maybe this year, when the government has been formed, we might be able to see him."
Artistically, the mural was stunning. Devotionally, the intent was clear. But in a Bengal that had just gone through a bitterly contested election — with Durga Puja itself used as cultural leverage by multiple parties — a puja committee making that kind of public political statement was never going to land without some noise.
The noise came.
The Committee Changes
The details of the exact internal disagreements within the Chorebagan Sarbojanin Durgotsav Samity are not something we'll pretend to know fully — internal puja committee politics is always complex, layered, and deeply personal. What has been reported and widely acknowledged is that the puja committee underwent a change after the Khuti Puja events. Whatever the internal dynamics — differing views on how political the puja's image should be, questions about who made decisions and with whose authority — the result is that the 91st year of this historic club is moving forward under a restructured leadership.
For a 91-year-old institution, a mid-season leadership shake-up is not a small thing. Puja committees are not just administrative bodies — they are repositories of community memory, personal relationships, and decades of accumulated trust between neighbours. When committees fracture, even temporarily, it leaves wounds that sometimes take longer to heal than the puja takes to prepare.
What we can say is this: whoever leads Chorebagan Sarbojanin through its 91st year, the puja itself carries the weight of nine decades of community faith. That doesn't disappear with a committee change. But it does require steady hands to carry forward.
The Wall Is Coming Down
And then there is the part of this story that is, genuinely, the saddest.
The Kolkata Municipal Corporation — now operating under a government that Suvendu Adhikari leads as Chief Minister — has issued a demolition notice for the building on whose wall the Maa Durga mural was painted. The building is being brought down. And with it, the wall goes. And with the wall, Maa's image — so carefully and lovingly painted just weeks ago — disappears too.
Let's be careful here about what we say and don't say. The demolition notice is for the building, not the mural. Buildings get demolition notices for many reasons — structural concerns, unauthorised construction, civic development plans. We are not in a position to say definitively what the reasons are in this specific case, and it would be unfair to speculate. What is certain is that the timing — a demolition notice arriving weeks after a politically charged mural goes viral on a building near the puja ground — is the kind of timing that invites uncomfortable questions, even if the legal reasons have nothing to do with the mural at all.
But here's what transcends the politics entirely: the image of Maa Durga, rendered with care by artists at the start of the puja season, is being erased. And that, regardless of what you think about the mural's politics, is simply sad.
There is a Bengali word for it — byadhona. A kind of pain that isn't sharp and sudden, but deep and quiet, like watching something beautiful disappear without being able to stop it.
The image of Maa was painted in bhakti — in devotion. Whatever the arguments that surrounded it, whatever the political colour it was given by different people, the act of painting the goddess was an act of love. For that image to now be reduced to rubble, before the puja season has even properly begun, carries a weight that the puja committee members, the artists, and the neighbourhood will all feel differently — but all will feel.
What This Means for the 91st Year
Here is where we step back and say the obvious, necessary thing: Chorebagan Sarbojanin's 91st Sharadotsav is still happening.
Committees change. Murals get demolished. Political storms blow through. Kolkata's Durga Puja — this specific puja, this specific address on Muktaram Babu Street — has survived Bengal's Partition, the Emergency, food scarcity, global pandemics, and every political shift the state has seen since 1935. It will survive this too.
The theme is still "Akal Bodhon" — and if anything, that theme feels more resonant now than when it was announced. Akal Bodhon is the story of seeking the goddess at an impossible, untimely moment. Waking her when she is supposed to be sleeping. Asking for her grace when the conditions are not right, when the lotuses are short, when the battle feels overwhelming. That is exactly the moment this puja community finds itself in right now — and the theme they chose, months before any of this unfolded, feels almost prophetic.
The idol is still being built. The pandal will rise. The Sharadotsav will happen. Maa will come.
A Note to Puja Lovers Following This Story
We have covered Chorebagan Sarbojanin's 91st year in detail because we believe in documenting the full, real story of Kolkata's pujas — not just the glossy pandal-night photographs, but the community, the ritual, the politics, and the emotions that surround this festival from July to October every year.
The current situation at Chorebagan is messy, as life in a newly changed political Bengal often is. But it is also deeply human — committees arguing, murals disappearing, communities wondering what their puja looks like in a new political reality. These are the kinds of stories that make Durga Puja more than a festival. They make it a mirror for the city it belongs to.
We will continue to track this puja through the 91st year — the new committee's direction, the theme development, the idol progress, and the final pandal reveal — and bring you honest, ground-up coverage as Sharad approaches.
Because Maa's image on that wall may be coming down. But Maa herself? She's still on her way.
