For years, India’s West Bengal state was the great exception to Narendra Modi’s political advance.His Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) had swept through India’s Hindi-speaking heartland, expanded into the west and north-east, and overwhelmed once-formidable regional rivals. Yet Bengal – argumentative and steeped in a self-image of cultural exceptionalism – remained stubbornly resistant.
That made this state election unusually consequential. With more than 100 million people, West Bengal’s electorate is larger than Germany’s, turning its election into something closer to a nation choosing a government than a routine Indian state poll.Monday’s BJP victory there would rank among the most significant breakthroughs of Modi’s 12-year reign. It is not merely the defeat of a three-term incumbent, but the completion of the party’s long march into eastern India.
“Winning Bengal is a big victory for the BJP – a land of promise that has long eluded its grasp,” says author and journalist Nilanjan Mukhopadhyay.
Monday produced an extraordinary political churn across India’s south as well.In Tamil Nadu, MK Stalin’s DMK government was swept aside by actor-turned-politician Vijay and his fledgling TVK party, marking the dramatic return of film-star politics to the state.
In Kerala, the Congress-led United Democratic Front (UDF) defeated the Left Democratic Front (LDF) after two consecutive terms, ending the last remaining Communist-led state government in India. Only in Assam did the BJP buck the broader anti-incumbent tide and retain power, while the party and its allies also held on to the federal territory of Puducherry.Yet nowhere were the results more politically significant than in Bengal.
The state has seen only one change of government in nearly half a century: the Communist Left Front ruled for 34 years before the Trinamool Congress (TMC), led by the firebrand populist Mamata Banerjee, dominated the next 15 years until now. Political scientists have long described Bengal as a system that favours “hegemonic” parties.
Analysts see the outcome 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 earlier breakthrough in Assam, Bengal was never a lightning conquest.The BJP has been a major force in Bengal for three successive elections, consistently polling around 39% of the popular vote,” says Rahul Verma, who is a fellow at the Centre for Policy Research.
Once it established itself near the 39-40% mark, he argues, “the party really needed only another 5-6% to cross the line”. Voting trends show the BJP mopping up more than 44% of the vote this time.What makes the result particularly striking is that the BJP achieved this despite still lacking the kind of deep organisational machinery that regional parties historically required to win Bengal.
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