A left front election

This chapter provides an electoral ethnography of a campaign in the state of West Bengal. The uniquely continuous electoral victories of the Left Front since 1977 in this eastern state of India throws up the puzzle of how a coalition of parties has achieved this feat in a country where incumbent governments repeatedly suffer electoral defeats. A thick ethnographic description of the campaigning process, tracing the numerous techniques, organisational hierarchies and political messages at every level of the state’s population, provides some answers to this conundrum.