Amid sporadic clashes and preventive arrests of Trinamool Congress leaders in Kolkata and various districts, the high-stakes West Bengal Assembly poll will see its second and final phase of the elections on April 29.Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee is looking for a fourth consecutive term in office. The BJP is determined to stop her and form the government in a state that has never had a right-wing party government before.Candidates for 142 Assembly seats will be chosen by about 3.2 crore voters in the second phase of the elections on Wednesday.The first phase of the elections was held on April 23 for 152 Assembly seats. It had a record turnout of voters that reached over 91 per cent — a number never achieved since Independence.The 142 constituencies are mostly in TMC leader Mamata Banerjee’s stronghold. In the 2021 elections, she won 124 of these, while the BJP could manage only 18 seats.The second phase has a fewer number of seats than the first phase but has a lot of political significance. If Mamata manages to maintain her last election’s performance, she has a strong chance of forming the government.If her numbers come down to 90 or even less, the BJP has a very strong chance of forming the government.Both Prime Minister Narendra Modi and Home Minister Amit Shah, in their meetings, have promised to put West Bengal on the development track, end corruption and bring all-round development while urging voters to exercise their right to bring a change in the state and weed out outsiders.Mamata, on the other hand, has banked on turning “Bengali Asmita” or “Bengali honour” into a major plank. She has implored voters to take Wednesday’s vote as an opportunity to register their protest against the insult to Bengalis and their culture by BJP leaders.During her padyatras and voter-contact programmes across the city, she has raised the Special Intensive Revision exercise, pointing out the “arbitrary and blatant manner” in which names of legitimate voters were deleted and the endless harassment they had to face at the hands of Election Commission officials who were acting at the behest of the BJP.She also complained about the arrest of TMC workers and intimidation of ordinary people by turning the city and other parts into a war zone with the heavy deployment of a central police force.Mamata, whose support among women, poor workers, slum-dwellers and the Muslim community seemed intact, has asked them to have trust in her by rallying behind her as they have done in the past.Election rhetoric apart, the salience of these Assembly elections has surpassed the interest in elections held in other states in this round. Many are looking at Mamata’s Bengal as the last bastion of resistance against the BJP.