Rajnath Singh's Durga Squad for 2026 Polls

Rajnath Singh's Durga Squad: The Promise That Won Bengal, Then Vanished

Rajnath Singh's Durga Squad, pledged on April 20, 2026, helped the BJP win West Bengal's women vote — but two months into Suvendu Adhikari's government, it has slipped off the agenda.

Union Defence Minister Rajnath Singh stood on a Sainthia stage in Birbhum on April 20, 2026 — three days before West Bengal opened the ballot — and promised a "Durga Squad" to police atrocities against women, framing the vote as "fear versus trust." Two weeks later the Bharatiya Janata Party had won 207 of 294 seats, its first-ever majority in the state, and Mamata Banerjee had lost her own constituency to the man she once mentored. Two months on, the Durga Squad exists nowhere in Chief Minister Suvendu Adhikari's early orders. The promise did what it was built to do — carry Hindu-coded women's-safety anxiety to the ballot box — and then quietly dissolved into the cash-transfer and deportation machinery that is now running the state.

That is the story worth telling: not the pledge, but its afterlife. The Durga Squad was never really a policing blueprint. It was a rhetorical bridge — from the RG Kar rape memory of August 2024 to a specifically Hindu register of protection — deployed by the Modi government's most trusted north-Indian face at the precise moment the BJP needed to peel women away from Banerjee's welfare coalition. Once the polls closed, the bridge was no longer load-bearing. Understanding why matters for how the BJP will campaign in the next tranche of state elections, and for what "women's safety" now means as a currency in Indian politics.

What Rajnath actually promised, and where

The Sainthia rally on April 20, 2026 was tightly scripted. "We will constitute Durga Squad to prevent atrocities against women. Those who will trouble women will be strictly dealt with," Singh told the crowd, according to The New Indian Express. He paired the pledge with a Seventh Pay Commission rollout for state employees and a promise that "the lotus will bloom in Bengal" on counting day. Deccan Herald reported the same Sainthia line-up, and The Hindu live coverage the same day noted that operational details — strength, funding, chain of command, statutory basis — were never disclosed. Singh also appealed to women directly by saying Prime Minister Narendra Modi "remains committed to implementing 33 per cent reservation for women in legislatures," a promise the ISAS Singapore analysts noted was politically awkward in a state governed by a three-term female chief minister (ISAS pre-poll).

The name did the heavy lifting. Durga — the Hindu warrior goddess whose autumn worship is Bengal's civic soul — is also, in the current BJP idiom, a rebuttal to Banerjee's "Durga Aangan" cultural complex, whose foundation stone she laid in Kolkata's New Town on December 30, 2025 to invoke Durga Puja's UNESCO intangible-heritage tag. BBC Hindi reported that the pre-poll months in Bengal saw a religious-symbolism arms race, with the BJP accusing the TMC of pre-election "appeasement" through temple projects and the TMC accusing the BJP of communalising the goddess. Rajnath's squad slotted directly into that fight. It was also a coded response to Banerjee's April campaign line — that a BJP win would mean bans on fish, meat and eggs, an "outsider" pitch that Al Jazeera described as identity-politics theatre and which pushed BJP candidates to campaign holding live fish. Where the fish gimmick tried to prove Bengaliness, Durga tried to prove protection.

The RG Kar shadow the pledge was built on

The Durga Squad idea did not appear in a vacuum. On August 9, 2024, a 31-year-old trainee doctor was raped and murdered on duty at Kolkata's RG Kar Medical College. Tens of thousands of women marched in the "Reclaim the Night" protests, according to the BBC, and the case triggered a nationwide junior-doctors' strike that Banerjee's government struggled to contain — eventually removing Kolkata's police commissioner and two senior health officials to end the impasse, per BBC reporting. In January 2025, a Kolkata court sentenced hospital volunteer Sanjay Roy to life; Banerjee publicly said she had wanted him hanged, according to the BBC. The verdict, meant to close the case, left the political wound open — the file the BJP would carry into Sainthia sixteen months later.

The underlying numbers made the attack land. Bengal recorded 34,738 crimes against women in 2022, according to a state-wise annexure filed by the Ministry of Women and Child Development in the Lok Sabha (sansad.in) — India's third-highest absolute total after Uttar Pradesh and Maharashtra, and third-highest again on children (8,950 cases in 2022 in the same annexure). Rajnath did not cite those numbers on stage. He did not need to. In post-election commentary, BBC quoted BJP leader Dharmendra Pradhan claiming that "voters, particularly women angered by atrocities and law-and-order failures, had decisively rejected the Trinamool Congress." That was the emotional circuit the Durga Squad was designed to close.

Why Rajnath, and why now

Sending the Defence Minister — not Amit Shah, not Himanta Biswa Sarma — to make the women's-safety pitch was a deliberate division of labour. Shah anchored the anti-corruption and polarisation frames from Kolkata; Sarma and state opposition leader Suvendu Adhikari delivered the sharper communal lines, sometimes in what ISAS called "communally charged speeches"; Rajnath, the party's least abrasive senior face and a former Uttar Pradesh chief minister, was deployed to soften the security promise into something a Bengali Hindu housewife would accept without flinching. He has form on the goddess brand: unveiling a statue of the Marwar warrior Veer Durgadas Rathore in Jodhpur in August 2022, he framed the Modi government as guarantor of a "foolproof security apparatus," per a Press Information Bureau release.

The register also handled a subtler task. The BJP's Bengal campaign — mapped in detail by the NUS Institute of South Asian Studies — combined "unprecedented Hindu consolidation" with a ₹3,000-a-month cash pitch for women, double the TMC's flagship Lakshmir Bhandar transfer. Cash secured the material vote; Durga Squad secured the affective one. That mattered because the 2021 Lokniti-CSDS post-poll survey had shown TMC support among women at 50%, four points above men — the coalition Rajnath was sent to fracture. Observer Research Foundation analysis of the 2026 rolls noted that West Bengal was the only poll-bound state where male electors outnumbered female, at 51.2%, after the Election Commission's Special Intensive Revision quietly redrew the electorate (ORF). With roughly nine million voters — 12% of the state's 76 million — struck off the rolls under the SIR, per Al Jazeera, the Hindu women's vote became mathematically decisive on tight margins. The BJP won, and won big — 46% of the vote against 41% for the TMC, a near-reversal of 2021 when the TMC took 215 seats to the BJP's 77.

The afterlife: what Adhikari has and hasn't done

The instructive part is what happened next. Adhikari was sworn in on May 9, 2026 on Rabindranath Tagore's birth anniversary, according to ISAS post-poll notes. His early decisions were consequential but pointedly not about women's-safety infrastructure. He notified the Ayushman Bharat health insurance scheme in West Bengal, transferred land to the Border Security Force to complete Bangladesh-border fencing, and rolled out the Annapurna Bhandar cash transfer of ₹3,000 a month to women from June 1, 2026 — with a sharp caveat that voters still under Special Intensive Revision adjudication would not qualify, per ISAS. That last clause turns cash into a citizenship instrument, and points to where the government's actual women's-safety energy has gone: not policing, but deportation.

Within weeks, Adhikari ordered district-level "holding centres" and a push to expel undocumented migrants, targeting Muslim Bangladeshis specifically under India's amended citizenship framework, according to Al Jazeera. By early June, the chief minister said nearly 5,000 people had been deported and 836 held in state-run centres. The Institute of Strategic Studies Islamabad briefing noted the holding-centre order came just three days after government formation. The Durga Squad, by contrast, has generated no notification, no budget line, no cadre order, and no ministerial statement. The National Commission for Women taking suo motu cognizance of a minor's rape-murder in Baruipur in early July, flagged by The New Indian Express sidebar coverage, has not produced a Durga Squad response either.

The historical parallel — and what it foreshadows

The Durga Squad is not the first BJP promise of a gendered special force to evaporate after victory. The academic literature on India's all-women police stations — a scheme rolled out most aggressively in Haryana in 2015, one year after the BJP came to power there — found that special institutions "significantly lightened the load" on standard police stations by deflecting gendered crimes rather than resolving them, according to a Stanford study of official police logs published in the American Political Science Review. The same paper documented that the Haryana stations were inaugurated en bloc on Raksha Bandhan for public-relations reasons, without a matching 33% quota for women in the force. The Uttar Pradesh anti-harassment squads Rajnath oversaw as chief minister-heritage carrier of the north-Indian security template were similarly criticised for moral policing within a year of launch, per an older BBC field report.

Central schemes already offer the scaffolding a Durga Squad could plug into if the state government chose. The Ministry of Home Affairs runs 14,658 Women Help Desks and 827 Anti-Human Trafficking Units nationwide under an umbrella scheme, according to a Press Information Bureau release. The Mahila Police Volunteer scheme, launched from Karnal on the same "warrior goddess" symbolism, produced 9,531 volunteers across eight states as of the last Lok Sabha data (PIB). None of these has yet been rebranded or extended in West Bengal under the Durga Squad name, and no state cabinet minute has emerged. The gap between the campaign promise and the governance file is not an oversight; it is the design.

Winners and losers

The winners are legible. Amit Shah, who BBC analysts named as "man of the match" for the Bengal campaign, has consolidated his standing as Modi's likely heir, "potentially placing him ahead of rivals such as Yogi Adityanath, Nitin Gadkari and Rajnath Singh in the party's next-generation power hierarchy." Rajnath, ironically, delivered a set-piece speech that helped Shah win the state that now lowers Rajnath's own succession ranking. Adhikari, defeating Banerjee in Bhabanipur while retaining Nandigram — per BBC — has the chief ministership and a mandate to reshape state–centre fiscal relations. The BJP's cash-transfer architecture, meanwhile, has replaced the TMC's without dismantling the underlying dependency politics.

The losers are equally legible. Banerjee, whose party fielded 52 women candidates according to a BBC profile, lost the women's vote that had been the backbone of her coalition; she now faces what the BBC called an "existential" fight for political survival. Bengali Muslim women, doubly hit by SIR deletions and holding-centre policing, are the demographic least likely to see any Durga Squad benefit — and most likely to encounter the state's coercive apparatus, per the Al Jazeera reporting on welfare-vote-roll linkage. And the RG Kar cohort — the junior doctors who marched in August 2024 — has yet to see the workplace-safety architecture their protests demanded materialise under either government.

What to watch next

Three concrete markers will tell us whether the Durga Squad becomes real or remains rhetoric. First, the Adhikari cabinet's first full budget, expected before the winter session, and whether it carries a specific line item under home or women-and-child-development for a Durga Squad cadre. Second, the outcome of pending Supreme Court cases on SIR-deleted voters — the ISAS analysis flagged 2.7 million adjudications outstanding — which will determine whether the government's welfare-and-safety schemes remain gated by citizenship status. Third, the next set of BJP state campaigns, where the Bengal template will be tested: if a Durga Squad or its analogue reappears elsewhere without ever materialising in Bengal, it will confirm the pledge's status as a portable campaign asset rather than a policy.

The Bottom Line

The Durga Squad was a campaign instrument, not a policing plan — a Hindu-coded, Rajnath-branded women's-safety pledge engineered to fracture Mamata Banerjee's female voter base after the RG Kar shock, and retired the moment it delivered its 207 seats. The BJP's actual Bengal project is now visible in what Adhikari is building: cash transfers gated by citizenship checks, holding centres along the Bangladesh border, and no Durga Squad file. Watch the next state election, not the Bengal budget, for where the goddess is deployed next.