Graffiti News

A by-election campaign in Rejinagar, in West Bengal's Murshidabad district, started on a wall. According to Lokmat Times, Humayun Kabir — chairman of the Aam Janata Unnayan Party (AJUP) and the sitting MLA for Naoda — began painting wall graffiti on Saturday, August 15, 2026, announcing his son's candidacy.

Who did what

Lokmat Times reports that Kabir won both the Rejinagar and Naoda seats at the recent Assembly polls, taking 51.62% of the vote in Rejinagar. In that contest he defeated the Bharatiya Janata Party candidate Bapan Ghosh by 58,876 votes and the Trinamool Congress candidate Ataur Rahman by 81,818 votes, according to the same report.

Having won two seats, Kabir resigned the Rejinagar one, which is why a by-election is due there. The candidate whose name he began painting on walls is his son, Golam Nabi Azad, known as Robin. Lokmat Times reports that the Election Commission had not formally announced the by-election at the time of publication and that it was expected within two months.

Kabir said "Golam Nabi Azad will win from Rejinagar" and added that "it would not be possible to bloom lotus in Rejinagar," Lokmat Times reported. The lotus is the election symbol of the Bharatiya Janata Party; Kabir's own party, AJUP, uses a flute.

What "graffiti" means here

In Indian election reporting, "graffiti" refers to party symbols, candidate names and slogans painted directly onto walls with a brush, not to aerosol tags. That is what makes the detail newsworthy: a party chairman picked up a brush himself. The same English word describes very different practices depending on where you are reading it — a distinction worth holding on to whenever street art is discussed across borders.

Why the wall comes first

The order of events is the interesting part. Before the election date was even announced, before rallies or advertising, the walls moved first. A wall is visible only inside the constituency, is passed by the people who live there, and can only be removed by someone physically going out to remove it. Unlike an online advert, a wall never leaves the neighbourhood it stands in. Paint remains the cheapest way to put a candidate's name at eye level on the street where the vote will be cast.

That logic is not confined to politics. It is the same reason a writer chooses one specific wall in their own city, and the same reason a painted shop shutter becomes part of a particular street. Walls make places precisely because they cannot move.

The question of consent

Political wall painting and graffiti raise the same question the moment paint touches someone else's property: was the owner asked. Election wall writing has been argued over repeatedly across Indian states, both as a property matter and as a campaign-expenditure one. The Lokmat Times report does not say whether the walls used in Rejinagar were painted with permission, and this piece does not fill that gap.

Wallscape does not rule on legality. It records what was painted and where. Campaign walls are usually painted over once the votes are counted, and the only place the before-and-after survives is in photographs. If a wall in your city is saying something right now, put it on the map or the feed before it is covered.