BJP Achieves Significant Victory in West Bengal, Marking a New Phase for Modi's Project

Kolkata. For years, India's West Bengal state was a major exception to Narendra Modi's political rise. His Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) had dominated India's Hindi-speaking regions, expanded into the west and northeast, and defeated once-powerful regional rivals. Yet Bengal, steeped in its own rational and cultural distinctiveness, had stubbornly remained resistant. This made the state's election unusually significant. With a population of over 100 million, West Bengal's electorate is larger than Germany's, making its election closer to a nation choosing its government than a regular Indian state election. The BJP's victory there on Monday will be counted among the most significant achievements of Modi's 12-year rule. It is not just the defeat of a party in power for three consecutive terms, but also the culmination of the party's long journey in eastern India. Author and journalist Nilanjan Mukhopadhyay says, 'Winning Bengal is a big win for the BJP, it is a land of possibility that has long been out of its reach.' Extraordinary political upheavals were also seen across southern India on Monday. In Tamil Nadu, MK Stalin's DMK government was ousted by actor-turned-politician Vijay and his newly formed TVK party, signalling a dramatic comeback for film-star politics in the state. In Kerala, after two consecutive terms, the Congress-led United Democratic Front (UDF) defeated the Left Democratic Front (LDF), ending the only remaining Communist-led state government in India. Only in Assam did the BJP manage to retain power, fending off an anti-incumbency wave, while the party and its allies also maintained their hold on the federal territory of Puducherry. However, no other result carried the political weight of Bengal's. This state has seen a change of government only once in nearly half a century: the Communist Left Front ruled for 34 years, followed by the dominance of the Trinamool Congress (TMC) under the leadership of the fiercely popular leader Mamata Banerjee for the last 15 years. Political scientists have long interpreted Bengal as a system that supports 'dominant' parties. Analysts see this result not as a sudden upheaval but as the culmination of a decade-long political project. Unlike the BJP's rapid rise in Tripura or its early success in Assam, Bengal was never an overnight victory. Rahul Verma, who teaches politics at Shiv Nadar School, says, 'For three consecutive elections, the BJP has been a major force in Bengal, consistently securing around 39 percent of the popular vote.' He argues, 'Once established at the 39-40 percent mark, the party needed only an additional 5-6 percent of votes to cross the line.' Voting trends show the BJP garnered over 44 percent of the vote this time. What makes this result particularly noteworthy is that the BJP achieved this success despite still lacking the deep organizational machinery that regional parties have historically needed to win Bengal. The Trinamool Congress maintained a dense grassroots network and Banerjee's charismatic dominance. However, despite accusations of rival political intimidation and the challenge of facing one of India's most established regional parties, the BJP repeatedly maintained a strong vote share. 'What this indicates,' Verma says, 'is that the party's support has now expanded beyond the limits of its relatively weak organizational structure.' So what caused the election to swing so sharply towards the BJP? For years, Banerjee's party had built a strong social coalition: a large section of women, Muslims, and Hindu votes from both rural and urban Bengal. Women, in particular, had become the backbone of the party's welfare-oriented politics. A post-election survey by Lokniti-CSDS in 2021 showed TMC's support among women reaching 50 percent – four percentage points higher than among men. This reflects the impact of years of women-centric welfare schemes and Banerjee's efforts to expand women's political representation. But this time, the BJP attempted to directly challenge that advantage by promising significant cash transfers and expanded welfare benefits of its own. Political scientist Bhanu Joshi says, 'Banerjee's long electoral success rested on a delicate balance between welfare and organization. But the very organization that sustained her for 15 years became her weakness.' 'That balance broke as the party machinery weakened and welfare politics reached its limits – voters began to see the benefits as routine rather than transformative.' 'The BJP's opportunity was to transform this disenchantment with the TMC into sharp language of Hindu consolidation. So this is not just a story of welfare schemes failing; it is a story of welfare and organization not being strong enough to prevent polarization,' Joshi says. Although the exact contours of voting trends are still unclear, this election has once again highlighted the centrality of Muslim voters in Bengal's political arithmetic. Muslims constitute about 27 percent of the total population, and Muslim populations have a significant presence in about one-third of the state's seats. In 2021, the TMC won 84 out of 88 Muslim-majority seats, reflecting widespread support for Banerjee. While initial indications suggest the party maintained significant Muslim support this time as well, the BJP has made continuous efforts to mitigate that advantage through broad Hindu consolidation and competitive welfare promises. Political scientist Maidul Islam of the Centre for Studies in Social Sciences, Kolkata, says, 'The BJP combined aggressive welfare proposals with sharp polarization. It promised to double cash benefits, while explicit communalization consolidated a section of Bengali Hindu votes in favour of the party.' However, BJP leaders have interpreted this result as a rejection of the Trinamool Congress rather than ideological consolidation. BJP leader Dharmendra Pradhan told a news network that the TMC had created a 'leadership crisis' for itself. Accusing the party of 'arrogance,' he claimed that 'voters, especially women, fed up with 'tyranny and failure of law and order,' had decisively rejected the Trinamool Congress.' Another major and undeniable issue was the highly controversial revision of Bengal's voter rolls. The Election Commission stated that the purpose of this exercise, known as a special intensive revision, was to clean up the voter list by removing fake or ineligible names. However, with nearly 3 million voters still awaiting tribunal decisions before the election, campaigners including Banerjee and civil society groups accused Bengal of going into elections after an effective 'mass disenfranchisement exercise.' According to them, this disproportionately affected poor and minority voters, especially Muslims and migrant communities in border districts. Analysts suggest that this exercise will now come under closer scrutiny in tightly contested seats where the margin of victory was much smaller than the number of deleted voters. Politician and campaigner Yogendra Yadav told the NDTV news network, 'The revision of the electoral rolls will show its effect after the results are out.' However, many believe that the controversy over the voter list alone cannot explain the scale of the BJP's rise. Another factor that worked in the party's favour was a tight election campaign focused on alleged corruption and governance failures within the Trinamool Congress, highlighting scandals like the teacher recruitment scam, rather than primarily personal attacks on Banerjee. As the BJP moves firmly on the path to victory, its impact will extend far beyond Bengal. Unlike neighbouring Bihar, where the party rules through a coalition, or Odisha, where its 2024 success came against a weak regional ruling party, Bengal's victory represents an independent triumph in one of India's most formidable political states. Mukhopadhyay says, 'This will make Modi extremely strong.' 'More than in Odisha, this will be seen as a personal political victory for Home Minister Amit Shah, who effectively ran the campaign, not just for Narendra Modi.' Within the BJP, Shah will almost certainly emerge as the unofficial man of the match – reminiscent of how Modi elevated him after the party's historic victory in Uttar Pradesh in 2014. Bengal's success could also reshape the BJP's succession politics, Mukhopadhyay suggests. It will solidify Shah's position as Modi's most likely successor, and likely place him ahead of rivals like Yogi Adityanath, Nitin Gadkari, and Rajnath Singh in the party's next generation power hierarchy. This will make Bengal's mandate significant far beyond the state itself. For decades, Bengal prided itself on resisting the political currents shaping the rest of India. Now that the BJP has finally broken into one of India's most durable regional strongholds, it may signal not only the end of an era in Bengal but also the beginning of a new phase for the Modi project itself. BBC