The chant “Jai Shri Ram”, hailing Lord Ram, has become a rallying cry and a means of Hindu mobilisation for the BJP across India, including West Bengal, where the party has grown into a major political force in recent years. The slogan’s spread in the state has gone hand in hand with that rise.

Roots in the Ayodhya movement

Ram, worshipped for centuries and regarded as the seventh avatar of Vishnu, became the subject of a widely used political chant during the Ramjanmabhoomi movement in Ayodhya nearly three decades ago, when kar sevaks campaigned to demolish the Babri Masjid, claiming it stood on Ram’s birthplace.

Analysts say the slogan caught on in Bengal, as elsewhere in India, during the 1980s, but did not become a sustained political theme because the Left Front government of the time handled the situation in an organised way. Political analyst Udayan Bandyopadhyay recalled the slogan and Hindu pride posters filling Kolkata’s streets, and large crowds turning out for BJP leader L.K. Advani’s Ram Rath Yatra as it crossed Bengal. He said the BJP then fielded 291 candidates in the 1991 assembly election and took its share of the vote to 11.34 per cent, up from 0.51 per cent in 1987.

Confrontations with Mamata Banerjee

The chant spread rapidly after an incident in May, when Chief Minister and Trinamool Congress chief Mamata Banerjee stopped her car at Chandrakona in West Midnapore district and challenged BJP activists who were chanting it near her convoy. Soon after the 2019 election results, she reacted again when BJP workers raised the slogan during her visit to the troubled Naihati-Bhatpara area of North 24-Parganas, getting out of her vehicle, trying to pursue them and ordering police to act. A few people were arrested the next day. Other Trinamool leaders were soon met with the same chants.

The BJP accused Banerjee and her party of disdain for Lord Ram and Hinduism in order to keep their minority vote base, and videos and memes of the incidents spread widely online. Barrackpore BJP MP Arjun Singh said 10 lakh postcards carrying the slogan would be sent to the Chief Minister’s office and residence. Banerjee answered with her own slogans, “Jai Hind” and “Jai Bangla”, and urged party workers to use them in reply.

An analyst’s view

Bandyopadhyay argued that Banerjee made a “fatal mistake” by reacting to the chants instead of ignoring them, and that she should have countered them by putting her government’s development agenda forward. In his view, the slogan gained more prominence because the Chief Minister confronted people herself, and one aggressive religious sentiment cannot be answered with another.

See also: Bharatiya Janata Party | Election news

Originally published on 26 July 2019. Rewritten on 9 October 2026.

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