The Liberation of Bengal

VIEWED WITH THE BENEFIT OF HINDSIGHT, IT IS MORE THAN LIKELY that future generations of pundits will come to see the West Bengal Assembly polls as a ‘wave’ election whose outcome had been clearly foretold. Certainly, the mag­nitude of the swing in favour of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) would prompt the conclusion that the writing was quite clearly on the wall. Yet, like most ‘wave’ elec­tions whose outcome seemed uncertain until the actual counting of votes, contemporary media accounts of the West Bengal election suggested a tantalising nail-biting finish. I will always recall the eerie silence, verging on expectancy, in Kolkata on the evening of May 3, the night before the counting. Indeed, until around 11AM on May 4, many of those representing the ruling dispensation refused to countenance the possibility of a regime change. After the false dawn of 2021 when the boast of a BJP victory was punctured by the grim reality of a further five years for Mamata Banerjee and accompanied by a vicious bout of post-poll violence that left more than 50 BJP activists dead, few imagined the impossible would actually happen.

This account of the 2026 West Bengal Assembly election that was convincingly won by BJP is written from two distinct per­spectives: first, as a political ana­lyst who has studied elections and electoral behaviour for near­ly five decades; and, second, as a participant in the actual electoral process as a candidate. I success­fully contested the 2026 election as a BJP candidate from the South Kolkata seat of Rashbehari. This was my second shy at electoral politics. I had unsuccessfully fought the Tarakeshwar seat of Hooghly district in 2021, also as a BJP candidate. Many of the obser­vations and conclusions of this essay are based on what might be called participatory research spanning a decade.

At one level, the expectation of a close contest, or even a BJP win in 2026, seemed unreal. In 2021, Mamata Banerjee’s Trin­amool Congress (TMC) coasted to an emphatic win, defying many predictions. On that occa­sion, BJP had mounted a spirited challenge, believing that its perfor­mance in the 2019 Lok Sabha elections (where it won 18 of the 42 parliamentary seats) could be improved upon. Indeed, in the run-up to the 2021 election, BJP successfully created an impression that TMC was on the verge of collapse. This impression was based on a series of defections, many masterminded by Mamata Banerjee’s erstwhile confidant Mukul Roy, from TMC to BJP.

Unfortunately for the BJP leadership, the challenge proved insufficient against a formidable regional party that had cut its teeth in the bitter war against the Left Front which had ruled West Bengal without break from 1977 to 2011. BJP made significant advances, particularly in North Bengal and what is called Rarh Bangla. But the 77 seats (out of 294) it won did not include anything meaningful from the erstwhile Presidency division—including Kolkata, the two wings of the 24 Parganas, Howrah, and Hooghly districts. In the entire industrial belt around Kolkata, TMC won all seats except one. In Kolkata and Howrah, BJP did not even open its account. BJP certainly made a big splash on the main roads, but its penetration into the lanes and bylanes of West Bengal was still very perfunctory.

There was a staggering 10.69 per cent lead TMC enjoyed over BJP in 2021. To a very large extent, Mamata Banerjee’s third consecutive victory owed disproportionately to her ability to secure the total, unflinching support of the Muslim community that comprises nearly one-third of the elector­ate. Exit polls suggested that some 90 per cent of the state’s Muslims preferred TMC to oth­er ‘secular’ parties, such as Con­gress and CPM. True, Didi was convincingly outpolled by BJP among Hindu voters. However, the coalition of the entire Mus­lim community and around 39 per cent of Hindu voters proved conclusive. It was also clear that the entrenched Bengali social and cultural establish­ment was unconvinced that the local BJP had the necessary Bengali credentials to rule the state. The earlier baggage of BJP being a party of Burrabazar (an area of Kolkata identified with the Marwari community) still weighed down BJP, although not as much as before.

The voting pattern in 2021 determined the course of West Bengal politics for the next five years. Mamata Banerjee’s over­dependence on Muslim sup­port became a feature of state policy and triggered a rising tide of hostility among Bengali Hindus. Since the former chief minister never concealed her grati­tude to Muslims for keeping her in power, the feeling among Hin­dus was that they had become second-class citizens in a state that had been created with the sole purpose of saving Bengali Hindus from being overwhelmed in Pakistan. The chief minister’s own suggestion that she stood between the Hindus and a vicious Muslim onslaught, far from alarming the majority, fuelled a profound sense of anger among Bengali Hindus.

Mamata Banerjee’s decision—egged on by the liberal secularists of Delhi—to make the Special Intensive Revision (SIR) of electoral rolls an important electoral plank also misfired. My own experience of door-to-door campaigning in Rashbehari suggested that SIR was a relative non-issue among Hindu voters. It may have been an issue in the Muslim community, but apart from those families where a member had been excluded, it was a non-issue for the majority community. Indeed, TMC’s many anti-SIR demonstrations, where a large section of the participants was visibly Muslim, only added to the belief that opposition to the SIR was a sectarian concern.

On the surface, West Bengal presented a picture of communal harmony. This owed mainly to a narrative set by the Left intelligentsia since the 1960s. According to this version of Bengali life, Hindus had transcended sectarian politics and forged a post- Independence identity that relegated religiosity entirely to the private sphere. Partition, for example, was as traumatic for Bengali Hindus as it was for their counterparts in northern India. However, over many decades, a sustained bout of Left indoctrination in the refugee colonies in and around Kolkata ensured a total silence over the causes of Partition. The focus shifted entirely to the miserable plight of the refugees inside India. The political hostility of a section of Congress to the Left-run refugee movement helped bolster this sense of denial. It is striking, for example, that until fairly recently, the horrors of the Muslim League’s Direct Action Day in 1946 and the Noakhali massacres the same year, were sought to be relegated to the status of footnotes. Likewise, it was only after the rise of BJP as a force in the state that the significance of the second Partition heralded by the Hindu leadership in July 1947 was accorded a significant role in the Bengali political imagination.

In the three decades of its rule, the Left Front was successful in keeping sectarian impulses in check, but this fragile equilibrium came unstuck under TMC. As the Muslim community increased its demands for a greater share of state benefits and political power, Mamata Banerjee tried her utmost to throw a few crumbs to the Hin­dus. The increasing carnivalisation of urban culture was an attempt to placate Hindu impulses by allowing festivities to prevail over Hindutva. It did have a nominal impact, not least because of some success in painting BJP as a party of Hindi-speaking outsiders. But the exercise faltered on issues of governance, particularly the mega-corruption of the TMC leadership. To this was added the growing assertiveness of the Muslim community and its recourse to communal violence in Mur­shidabad and Malda districts. The anti-Hindu riots in post- Sheikh Hasina Bangladesh viti­ated the environment further, to which were added growing concerns about national securi­ty on the India-Bangladesh bor­der. The Mamata government tried to gloss over the attacks on minorities in Bangladesh in the belief that this would somehow offend Muslims in West Bengal.

Whether or not Indian Muslims were placated by TMC’s silence on the events in Bangladesh is a matter of conjecture. The local Muslim community was already too deeply invested in TMC to be concerned by the thrashing of Bangladeshi Hindus. What was however undeniable was that a large section of Bengali Hindus was disturbed by events in Bangladesh. This included the residents of the erstwhile ‘colonies’ in and around Kolkata where the erstwhile refugees from East Pakistan and Bangladesh had settled. The persecution of Bangladeshi Hindus brought back memories of the suffering their parents and grandparents had to endure in the aftermath of Partition. This directly fed into the BJP narrative of the need for Hindus to unite to prevent West Bengal from becoming another Bangladesh.

Accurate estimates of the quantum of Hindu consolidation in the 2026 election are still awaited. In 2021, BJP managed to win between 50 and 52 per cent of the Hindu vote. The consolidation was particularly marked in North Bengal and parts of East Midnapore district and less pronounced in North and South 24 Parganas, Howrah, and Kolkata. Anecdotal evidence suggests that in 2021 BJP secured the support of Hindi speakers but failed to capture the minds of urban bhadralok voters whose sociopathic-political influence far exceeded their actual numbers.

IN HINDSIGHT, IT was clear that in 2021 BJP was lacking in cultural sensitivity. As an all-India party, BJP, quite under­standably, drew from its vast repertoire of national resources for its West Bengal campaign. Unfortunately, some of its national leaders entrusted with the responsibility of giving a strategic thrust to the campaign and resource management, assumed total charge, subsuming the local leadership. This sent a wrong mes­sage to an electorate that had over the decades developed a wariness of control from Delhi. TMC exploited this exagger­ated sense of exceptionalism to the hilt, presenting Mamata Banerjee as Bengal’s daughter and BJP as Hindi-speaking outsiders.

These mistakesweren’t repeated in 2026. Mamata Banerjee’s desperate attempt to make the Bengali penchant for fish an election issue fell on deaf ears. In this election, BJP was fi­nally accepted by the bhadral­ok—and with enthusiasm. From personal experience I can vouch for the fact that the sup­port for BJP was most marked in the areas of South Kolkata where middle-class Bengalis with a strong sense of cultural rootedness resided.

The bid to weaponise Ben­gali exceptionalism in favour of the regional party did not work in 2026 for a variety of reasons.

First, the quantum of anti-incumbency in 2026 was substantially greater than five years ago. After 15 years of TMC rule, Bengalis had become mindful of the state’s growing irrelevance in national life. In 2021, this mar­ginalisation was attributed to the Hindi belt’s cultural disengage­ment from Bengali impulses. However, five years later, the same decline was pinned on the colossal misgovernance of the state by TMC and the venality of its leadership. This election witnessed a very large participation of Bengalis who worked as migrant labour and those educated Bengalis who had left the state owing to the lack of opportunities. According to statistics BJP secured from the Indian Railways, nearly 1.54 crore people travelled to West Bengal from other parts of India in the 15 days before April 23 and 29. The railways organised 1,437 special trains to West Bengal to meet the extra demand. Not all those who made the extra effort to vote supported BJP, but the mobilisation by the saffron party certainly yielded extra dividends. The anecdotal evidence to this effect was too overwhelming.

Second, in 2021, Mamata Banerjee scored heavily among wom­en voters for her generous monthly payment of `1,000 under the Lakshmi Bhandar scheme. The scheme was universal and was treated as pocket money by many women, both employed and homemakers. Although the payments were raised to `1,500 in the interim budget of 2026 by Mamata, it failed to generate the same excitement the scheme had done in 2021.

This wasn’t due only to BJP promising `3,000 for its Anna­purna Bhandar scheme. BJP’s generous commitment made it possible for the saffron par­ty—which hitherto enjoyed a nominal following among the poor in urban areas—to get a hearing, an opening it used to spread a larger message on women’s security and jobless­ness in the state. In the erstwhile Presidency Division centred on Kolkata, BJP completely up­staged TMC in seats that had a large concentration of slums. TMC prevailed only in Muslim-dominated areas.

Third, while the Hindu bhadralok is not very significant numerically, the bhadralok’s role as the state’s foremost opin­ion-maker has been grudgingly acknowledged by all. From 1977 to 2011, the battle for the hearts and minds of the bhadralok voter involved the Left and Con­gress ecosystem (which morphed into TMC after 1998). BJP was not even a factor. It was only after 2014 that BJP began attracting votes. However, it lacked any worthwhile organisation, a shortcoming that persisted even in 2026.

TMC, ON THE other hand, was always a Kolkata phe­nomenon and it dominated every aspect of civil society in Kolkata and its environs. This included the Durga Puja committees, the neighbourhood sport clubs and all the slums. Initially, the functionaries of these bodies served as the party’s foot soldiers, challenging the Left which adopted more conventional forms of mobilisation. However, with time, and especially after the 2021 Assembly election, the TMC organisation turned into extor­tion rackets and centres of harassment of both businesses and ordinary people. What came to be called “Syndicate Raj” touched almost every aspect of community life and soon became a byword for unabashed terror. At the forefront of this state-sponsored crimi­nalisation were the MLAs, councillors and panchayat members of TMC. The scale of their extortion—backed by the requisite muscle power—was stupendous and affected ordinary people adversely. In effect, the last phase of the Mamata government saw West Bengal’s transformation into a criminal enterprise. A thorough empirical study of this descent into mafia rule will be quite an eye-opener for those who viewed the 15 years of TMC through the ideo­logical prism of secularism and populism.

Fourth, there was a certain vulgar swagger in the function­aries of TMC that was deeply offensive to ordinary Bengali sensitivities. The arrogance was particularly marked in the imperious ornamentalism of Mamata Banerjee’s desig­nated heir apparent Abhishek Banerjee, MP from Diamond Harbour. Beginning with his security protocol that was de­signed to impress ordinary folk with its show of power to his verbal bluster and open threats to anyone who dared fly the BJP flag, there was an overdose of the upstart in the man who was referred to as the “bhaipo” (nephew). This overbearing style in turn was replicated by the lesser functionaries of TMC, most of whom had never tasted life in the opposition.

It was the heinous assault and murder of a medical stu­dent at the RG Kar Medical College on August 9, 2024 that brought things to a head. It was not merely the fact that such an incident could happen inside a crowded public hospital in the heart of Kolkata that was shocking. It was the state gov­ernment’s brazen lack of contri­tion and the shameful cover-up that proved completely unac­ceptable to public opinion. The month-long protests that attracted ordinary people on an unprecedented scale were somehow derailed by the rul­ing party, using the inherent sectarianism of the Left, but the scars remained. The suggestion that the electoral demise of the Mamata government began on the day people took to the streets in protest against the RG Kar in­cident is incontrovertible. From then onwards the degeneration of TMC was firmly embedded in the public imagination. After the initial outbursts in August and September 2024, the public protests subsided. The anger became subterranean—completely missed by the media and punditry—and was silently expressed through the press of an EVM button in April 2026.

Finally, in the wake of the huge measure of Hindu consolida­tion—estimates range from 58 to 70 per cent—there is an un­derstandable inclination to view the West Bengal verdict as the culmination of a patient ideological project. That BJP planned the Bengal election campaign with a meticulousness that is rare in Indian politics is undeniable. No group, community or clus­ter was thought too insignificant for the party’s planners. The organised travel of migrant Bengalis from every corner of India back to their homes for voting was undertaken with precision. Experienced BJP workers from different parts of the country were despatched to each and every constituency to help local units and report to the party headquarters on the progress of the campaign. These inputs were responsible for the precise de­ployment of resources. Unlike both 2021 and the Lok Sabha polls of 2024 where resources of the party were squandered without always optimising benefits, this election saw more targeted spending by the party. In West Bengal, BJP faced an opponent that didn’t lack money power and more so if the candidates happened to be sitting MLAs, local munici­pal councillors and panchayat functionaries. As opposed to the entrenched clout of TMC candidates, BJP candidates were mainly party activists who lacked the money power of their opponents. This short­coming was compensated for by the targeted deployment of resources by the party. This was one election where there were no complaints from BJP candidates of insufficient sup­port from the party centre. BJP entered this election with a de­termination to secure victory at all costs. The mission was accomplished.

Yet, this spectacular victory wasn’t a result of an efficient election machine. BJP put to­gether a basic organisational architecture that could tap the fierce anti-incumbency mood. However, this was no real match for TMC’s well-oiled machine whose presence was felt in every locality. Ironically, it was this over-bearing presence of the incumbent, supple­mented by the swagger, arrogance and high-handedness of its local functionaries, that won the day for BJP. The party’s great­est achievement was in being able to persuade Bengali Hindus that this was more than an ordinary election: it was a mission to reverse 50 years of decline and redefine the mental map of West Bengal.

This wasn’t necessarily what Prime Minister Narendra Modi and Home Minister Amit Shah spoke at rallies. How BJP was perceived on the ground was a case of people improvising its message to cor­respond to an agenda of change that was both personal and collec­tive. The force that finally drove Mamata Banerjee wasn’t generated through public discussions and ponderous seminars. Maybe people expressed their frustrations and aspirations in quiet family circles. But overall, it was the evocative language of silent glances and a determination to go out and vote that won the day for BJP.

This was a silent revolu­tion against fear. It was West Bengal’s liberation.