Shikha Mukerjee | A Hindu Vote for Change Shakes Up West Bengal

The BJP’s relentless pursuit of capturing West Bengal and establishing its empire of the North has finally come to pass. The May 4 result in West Bengal is the ascent of a new Hindu assertion, the fragmentation of the Muslim consolidation that supported the Trinamul Congress through its three terms in power, since 2011, backed by a precise estimate of how the savage deletions of 91 lakh voters, Hindus and Muslims, by the Special Intensive Revision process of electoral roll purification.

The 2026 results in Kerala, Tamil Nadu and West Bengal, though not in Assam or Puducherry, is a people’s verdict against incumbent ruling regimes. In holding the governments of the three states where the ruling party or ruling alliance has been ousted, voters seemed to have based their preferences on perceived failings and discontents. The ruling establishments were held to account and judged unsatisfactory in discharging their responsibilities. The failure to meet expectations implies that not just Gen-Z in Tamil Nadu, but voters in West Bengal and Kerala are impatient for change.

The BJP’s triumph is in spreading its polarising thesis that Bharat that was India is a Hindu-majority nation where the Muslims suspected as “ghuspaithiyas”, or illegal infiltrators, must be detected, deleted and deported has succeeded. From Manipur, where the BJP government has failed to control the internecine violent confrontations between Meiteis, Kukis and Nagas, to Goa on the west coast, barring the tiny unannexed territory of Jharkhand and Himachal Pradesh up in the western Himalayas, the party has established itself as the dominant political force. West Bengal was the exception and now it has joined the crowd.

It’s only in the states south of the Vindhyas -- Kerala, Tamil Nadu, Telangana and Karnataka – that the BJP has not, as yet, achieved the dominance that the Congress once had. The one-party-rules-it-all trophy has eluded the BJP’s grasp till now. If that happens, the consequences would be a transformation of India’s politics, its flawed but innately democratic and republican ideology and character.

In West Bengal, what really worked for the BJP was the strong anti-incumbency sentiment among voters, cutting across the usual distinctions of class, the excesses of abuse of power by local Trinamul Congress “bahubalis”, masquerading as “leaders”, the inability of Mamata Banerjee to contain the corruption that had invaded her government’s functioning, the sense of insecurity it had instilled and the disenchantment among major sections of women and men about personal safety and security, especially in the aftermath of the R.G. Kar Medical College and Hospital rape-murder case. These discontents congealed into a wave of rejection, delivering to the BJP a near two-thirds majority in the 294-member Assembly.

The BJP micro-managed the fissures and cracks, the internal dissensions and the collective grievances of different sections of voters to craft a decisive victory. Merciless as only West Bengal’s voters can be, the outcome in 2026 may be of some consolation to Mamata Banerjee. She has managed to salvage [XXXX] seats out of the 293 of 294 seats in the Assembly and her own Bhowanipore seat, despite the massive deletion of names from the voters’ list and a formidable opponent, Suvendu Adhikari. When she wrecked the CPI(M)-led Left Front bastion in 2011, not only did chief minister Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee lose his Jadavpur seat but the Left sank to total of only 62 seats.

The challenge for Mamata Banerjee and the BJP leadership is a post-poll peaceful and seamless transfer of power, as behoves India’s status as the world’s largest democracy. The challenge is not so much for the local BJP leadership; it is for Prime Minister Narendra Modi and home minister Amit Shah, as well as the BJP’s indefatigable organiser Bhupender Yadav, who camped in West Bengal for six months to micro-manage the party’s victory ’s triumph to ensure that the post-poll situation remains turbulence-free.

The sweeping wins of the BJP across not just its strongholds in North Bengal, but in Muslim-majority districts of Murshidabad, Uttar Dinajpur and Malda, and on Mamata Banerjee’s turf, that is the South Bengal districts comprising the Presidency Division of yore require, require it to handle the post-poll effects with care. Had the Trinamul Congress and its leader been discarded in the same way as the CPI(M)-led Left had been, managing the post-poll effect would have been easier for the BJP.

The first green shoots have shown up for the CPI(M) and the Congress in this election, ending their five-year dormancy, after they won zero seats in the 2021 Assembly election. A more granular analysis of how people voted in constituencies where the fight was triangular or even quadrangular will reveal how the revival of the two erstwhile ruling parties impacted the Trinamul Congress and contributed to its defeat, as well as how the performance of these two had split votes and enabled the BJP to come out on top.

The BJP has promised change in West Bengal; it has wooed voters by positioning itself as a more reliable alternative. What exactly does that change mean to all the different sections of voters that chose the BJP is unknown. Also unknown is how soon do they expect to see the change reflected in their daily lives, because in India, real change takes time. In West Bengal it will be easy for the BJP to deliver change albeit in small coins, like the promised hike in cash transfers to women and jobless youth, implementing the Seventh Pay Commission benefits to government employees, release of long-held back funds on Centrally-funded schemes, unrolling Central schemes that Mamata Banerjee had declined to adopt.

For real change, like an economic turnaround and lift-off, the BJP cannot set a timeline. The world economy is in far too turbulent a state for the BJP to predict what it can do and what it can spend to buffer the impact of global instability on the lives of ordinary people, already stressed by inflation, joblessness and declining incomes.

Going forward, over the next five years the BJP has to deal with its two major promises: change and its declared priorities. To fulfil the change agenda, the state needs peace and stability and a modicum of consensus on achieving the change. To fulfil its declared priorities of zero-tolerance for “ghuspaithiyas”, bar their entry, to deport all those identified by the SIR process, the BJP will have to destabilise the social equilibrium. Managing the contradictions will be difficult, because as the party in power, it has to maintain law and order and a smooth transition of power.