From Red Flags to Saffron: Brigade Parade Ground Prepares for Its Newest Chapter With Suvendu Adhikari
There is something almost theatrical about the Brigade Parade Ground. Kolkata’s great open-air stage has seen Soviet leaders receive thunderous ovations. It has watched Indira Gandhi and Bangabandhu share a platform as a new nation took its first breath. It has witnessed Mamata Banerjee wield it like a personal weapon against Delhi. Now, on the morning of May 9, Rabindranath Tagore’s birth anniversary, this legendary stretch of Maidan grass prepares to host something it has never quite hosted before: the swearing-in of a BJP Chief Minister in Bengal.
That alone should make you pause.
A Ground That Has Seen Everything
Long before exit polls and television debates decided political fortunes, Bengal measured power in bodies, how much crowd you could pull to Brigade. The CPI(M) turned this into an art form. Through the 1970s, 80s, and 90s, the Left Front used Brigade rallies as living proof of its grip on the state’s imagination. The ground didn’t just host politics; it was politics.
In 1955, Nikita Khrushchev and Nikolai Bulganin were feted here when Kolkata still considered itself the socialist capital of South Asia. In the aftermath of Bangladesh’s birth, Indira Gandhi stood at this very microphone beside Sheikh Mujibur Rahman while cries of Jai Bangla and Jai Hind rose together into the Maidan sky. In 1984, Jyoti Basu, N.T. Rama Rao, and Farooq Abdullah gathered here to plot a national opposition strategy. In 2005, Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez spoke at a Left Front rally, a moment so improbable it still sounds like fiction.
Then came Mamata. The TMC remade Brigade in its own image, famously using it in January 2019 to launch a national opposition alliance against the BJP. That rally was her show of force— the message being: come to Kolkata, we lead here.
Tomorrow, the BJP answers.
The Man Who Made It Possible
Suvendu Adhikari’s journey to the Chief Minister’s chair is not a gentle political rise. It is a rupture, a gamble, and ultimately a vindication. He left the Trinamool Congress in 2020, a party he had served loyally, a party where his own family wielded significant influence in Contai and joined the BJP. It was the kind of move that political opponents call treachery and supporters call courage. History, it turns out, has sided with the latter reading.
His decision to contest from Bhabanipur against Mamata Banerjee herself apart from Nandigram was audacious to the point of recklessness. He won from both the seat. That result became the emotional spine of the BJP’s Bengal campaign proof that the tide had turned, that the fear which had defined Bengal’s political culture for a decade and a half was not invincible.
When Union Home Minister Amit Shah formally announced Adhikari’s name after the party’s historic sweep 207 seats in a 294-member Assembly, ending 15 years of TMC rule, the choice surprised no one who had followed the campaign. Adhikari had been everywhere: loud, tireless, and pointedly unafraid.
“I have received support from all MLAs. There is democracy in the BJP,” he said after being elected legislature party leader. He then asked the gathering to stand and raise slogans of Narendra Modi Zindabad. It was vintage Adhikari— confident, populist, and not remotely subtle.
Who Will Be in the Audience
May 9’s ceremony is expected to draw several BJP Chief Ministers from across the country. Names being confirmed include Yogi Adityanath from Uttar Pradesh, Himanta Biswa Sarma from Assam, who played a quiet but significant role in the Bengal campaign along with CMs from Madhya Pradesh, Rajasthan, and Gujarat. Prime Minister Narendra Modi will preside over the occasion. Their presence underlines what Delhi sees in this result: not just another state election win, but a symbolic conquest of the one territory that had remained stubbornly out of reach.
What This Means for Bengal
The BJP’s campaign ran on a sharp, memorable phrase: Bhoy Out, Bharosa In. Fear out, trust in. It was a direct indictment of how political violence, administrative capture, and the suffocation of dissent had come to define life under TMC rule in many districts. Voters in Bengal particularly in rural belts, among women who had watched their husbands get threatened, among traders squeezed by syndicate networks appear to have decided they had had enough.
What Adhikari’s government actually delivers is, of course, the harder question. West Bengal has slipped in economic rankings, infrastructure investment has lagged, and industries that once defined the city have long since moved elsewhere. The new CM has promised to implement the BJP’s election commitments on jobs, on law and order, on women’s safety. He will be held to those promises, loudly and quickly.
Bengal does not forgive easily. It never has.
Getting There: What Kolkata Commuters Need to Know
If you are heading anywhere near the Brigade Parade Ground on Saturday, plan accordingly. Kolkata Police Commissioner Ajay Nand has issued a comprehensive traffic advisory effective from 4 AM to 8 PM.
Major routes including Esplanade Ramp, Kidderpore Road, Hospital Road, Lovers Lane, Casuarina Avenue, and Queensway will face regulated movement depending on crowd and security requirements through the day. Goods vehicles are banned from operating within Kolkata Police jurisdiction during this entire window with exemptions granted to vehicles carrying LPG cylinders, CNG, petroleum products, oxygen, medicines, vegetables, fruits, fish, and milk. If you have no essential reason to drive near the Maidan corridor on Saturday morning, stay home or use the Metro.
The Symbolism of the Date
Whoever chose May 9, Rabindranath Tagore’s birth anniversary as the date for this oath ceremony either has a sharp sense of history or an excellent communications team. Possibly both. Tagore wrote about freedom, about the Bengal he loved and the Bengal he feared could become small and fearful. Whether the new government lives up to the spirit of that date is something only time will answer.
For now, the workers are erecting giant rainproof hangars across the Maidan. Policemen are drawing security grids in chalk. And a ground that has hosted the world’s biggest ideas- communism, liberation, opposition unity, is getting ready for one more exciting chapter.
This one begins with saffron.
Schedule : The swearing-in ceremony
Date: 9 May 2026
Timing: Scheduled for 10 a.m. onwards
Day: Saturday on occasion of Rabindra Jayanti