India, April 26 -- Kolkata has long been the city that has eluded the Bharatiya Janata Party. Even in the 2021 Assembly elections, when the saffron wave washed over much of rural Bengal and the party secured 77 seats statewide, it drew a blank inside the city limits.

The Kolkata Municipal Corporation's 144 wards, spread across constituencies that were once Congress strongholds and later Left bastions before the Trinamool Congress colonised them comprehensively after 2011, have remained stubbornly resistant to the BJP's advances.

The second phase of the 2026 West Bengal Assembly elections on April 29 will see the party's most determined attempt yet to change that. At the centre of that bid is Bhabanipur-Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee's h...