West Bengal legislative assembly polls were held in two phases, on April 23, and April 29, 2026. Tamil Nadu’s were held on April 23. Extreme heat was on back in March itself, escalating to 35C in the month’s first week. Temperatures crosses 40C in Mumbai, triggering heat wave alerts. Last time temperatures soared early like this was in March 2011.
April was an oven. On April 27, Banda in Uttar Pradesh recorded 47.6C, a temperature at which you would be seeing your ancestors circling around you. Heat baked central India and the Indo-Gangetic plains, many places logging above 40C and some creeping up to 45C.
With all the predictions and forecasts available, India holds elections in infernal heat. Back in 2024 too, the Election Commission held polls in the summer when there were forecasts that it was going to be a scorcher, and that longer-lasting heat waves would occur. This has been so since 1996. There is, of course, the rule that there cannot be more than six months between the last session of parliament or state assembly and the convening of new session.
India is perhaps the only democracy where the mandarins of the electoral process make it harrowing to vote and punish citizens to make democracy work. In the blistering heat, politicians walked their walk and talked their talk. Their chelas walked along with them. So did regular people, attending meetings and gatherings.
It’s just not the question of why India holds its election in extreme weather; rather, it is that that why Indians don’t demand issues of climate change and extreme weather events become mainstream conversation. Even while people burn or drown in the here and now, climate issues remain on the backburner.
Soumyananda Dinda too wonders about this. He is a professor of economics at the University of Burdwan. He laments that no political party is focusing on climate-related issues.
He says climate could be one of the major points in political discourse, particularly in a developing economy like ours. It is pertinent, more specifically, in West Bengal, which gets hammered by extreme weather events triggered by climate change. The southern part of Bengal, near the Bay of Bengal, is always battered by cyclones. They regularly pummel districts such as Midnapur and South 24 Parganas.
“People remain poor because of climate change,” Dinda tells Hot Rock.
The governments are pro-poor in their orientation but mostly, it remains on the paper. For example, he says, if a river floods and takes away houses, things, belongings, and whatever little people have, people suffer. They fall many rungs on the economic ladder. They may never get back to their living standards before the natural calamity.
If the governments make some reconstruction of the riverbeds or river banks, then a the lot of many people will improve. “Automatically, they will come out from the poverty line. But no one is doing that,” he says.
He rues the fact that the agendas of political parties are driven by corporate interests rather than people-centric policies for improving lives and livelihoods. He says distributing some money after some disaster is “ for manipulating (the victims’) mind”. “They give a small amount and then extract more in other way,” he says.
In TV debates too, climate issues are rarely mentioned. Dinda thinks oliticians are not at all interested in climate issues. Even if a politician raises it, others within that same group try to block it. “If a politician raises these issues, they have to address it, be it flooding or heat. They won’t do that; instead they feel it’s better to drop it.” To their credit, both the Congress and BJP talk about climate change in their manifestos.
Another factor in extreme weather events is that they don’t occur daily. A flood comes; takes things away; and that’s that. Heat comes, stays and goes away in winter; then the cold comes.
Dinda says the nature of extreme weather events change according to the season. People suffer and they forget the previous disaster. “Most of the people, even those who are suffering every year, even they are interested in raising this issue,” he says.
Extreme weather events happen and end in measured time, whereas vulnerability due to that event persists, in some cases, a lifetime. However, that too is changing. Up to 200 million people are in the line of deadly heat by 2030, according to a report from the Salata Institute of Climate Change and Sustainability at Harvard University.
Dinda reports that the fishermen in the Sundarbans are exposed to climate change and its ripple effects. They are catching less and less fish. To make ends meet they remain at sea longer, venture farther, and sometimes getting caught in ferocious cyclones and end up dead.
It is consistently noted that West Bengal is one of India’s most climatically vulnerable states driven by a combination of high-intensity hazards and low adaptive capacity. Intensifying cyclones such as Amphan 2020 and Yaas 2021 have resulted in salt water intrusion, loss of arable land, and the destruction of mud-and-thatch houses, among many.
As a researcher of green growth, Dinda suggests that restoration of land and rebuilding natural defences like mangroves will help in reducing the suffering people face.
According to a working paper— Storms, Floods, Landslides and Elections in India’s Growing Metropolises: Hotbeds for Political Protest?—by Viktoria Jansesberger, University of Konstanz, Germany, “undeniably, storms, floods, and landslides can have extremely adverse impacts in urban areas.” These trigger political discontent. However, she , “in many rapidly growing metropolises in the Global South, residents are frequently confronted with disastrous weather events that cause hardship, yet actual protests remain relatively rare.”
One of her conclusions is : “(there is a) statistically significant increase in the likelihood of anti-government protests following sudden destructive weather disasters, such as storms, floods, and landslides, when they strike shortly before elections for the state legislative assembly. Importantly, this effect is not observed in nonelection periods or in the lead-up to nationwide general elections.”
While West Bengal has seen no climate-distress related protests this election season, that’s no guarantee that Konstanz’s thesis will continue to hold for the future.
