The streetfighter has been beaten. For the first time in many years, some people on the ground in West Bengal saw weakness in Mamata Banerjee’s Trinamool Congress (TMC). Voters complained of cut money, the violence of local workers, a lack of jobs, a desire for poriborton (change) — ironically the same tagline on which Banerjee swept to power in 2011.
The TMC had pinned its hopes of holding on to power to the “Bengal model” it used five years ago, a combination of winning Muslim voters and counteracting Hindu-Muslim polarisation by appealing to female voters across the spectrum. Back then, Banerjee’s welfare policies such as Lakshmir Bhandar grants of ₹1,500 to women between 25 and 60 had done the trick, but this time very few people mentioned the scheme as a genuine reason to support the TMC. In this sense, the election boiled down to whether the TMC could prevent Hindu women from voting like their male counterparts (who had already been voting for the BJP in very large numbers).
Since its drubbing in 2021, the BJP had revamped its strategy in West Bengal. Knowing that it had a weaker party organisation, it sought to simultaneously dent TMC’s welfarism advantage (by promising ₹3,000 to women — double of Lakshmir Bhandar), while seeking to find a narrative that would allow it start winning more in Greater Kolkata, hitherto TMC’s stronghold, by painting the TMC as a party incapable of bringing economic development.
But the BJP was also helped by the Special Intensive Revision (SIR) of electoral rolls. Its impact was far greater than mere cuts and additions. As I documented with Bhanu Joshi, the real impact came in the murkiness of how it was being applied. When Hindus saw Muslims in neighbouring localities and villages being struck off the electoral rolls in a charged atmosphere, it gave way to a series of rumours to sow greater division between the Hindu and Muslim communities. Was the person really from Bangladesh? Did they have illegal documents?
Between 2021 and 2026, the BJP gained seven percentage points and the TMC lost roughly the same. If we assume that, at a minimum, BJP didn’t gain any ground among Muslims in Bengal with SIR, then this translates into about one in every 10 Hindus in the state switching from the TMC to the BJP. Many people had assumed that it was easy to polarise the northern and western regions of the state (where the BJP swept again in 2026), but that this would weaken in the TMC stronghold of Greater Kolkata. However, if anything, the polarisation grew.
One of the demographic quirks of Bengal, as compared to the rest of India, is that the Muslim population is disproportionately rural. According to the 2011 Census, about 31% of the population in rural Bengal is Muslim, as compared to just 19% of the population in urban Bengal. Two things stood out. One, a very large urban-rural gap emerged in voters, with those in urban and peri-urban areas disproportionately siding with the BJP; two, the gender gap nearly closed in South Bengal as religion became the predominant predictor of vote choice.
In 2021, Greater Kolkata was an outlier in the BJP’s traditional mobilisation model as the urban and peri-urban spaces disproportionately voted in favour of the TMC.
But, in 2026, with the more heavily Hindu urban and peri-urban areas demonstrating higher levels of religious polarisation, many of these seats came to the BJP.
This is not to pretend that there wasn’t genuine frustration with a frequently violent TMC party cadre, the lack of genuine employment opportunities in a state where hundreds of thousands were pushed into distress migration, the repeated heavy-handedness of TMC leaders and ministers, and the genuine baggage of running a government for 15 years. Banerjee’s imperious ways and running the government in her image appears to have run its course, as had her welfare push. But it is also important to note that the levels of polarisation we observed were not simply a function of local dynamics but rather driven by the actions of the State.
What happens next? The BJP has swept the election, and will form the state government. Some will continue to believe that the BJP came to power by using central government resources to unfairly target the Muslim community. But even for those “whose side won”, what will be the expectations for a party that had little ground cadre in the run-up to the election?
West Bengal has never seen a BJP government. In contrast to an imagination of politics dominated by Prime Minister Narendra Modi and chief minister Banerjee, most people we spoke to did not care much who the BJP would choose as chief minister, as long as there was a change in government. The BJP will have to start by demonstrating that it can be better, lowering the levels of local party violence and corruption that Bengalis became accustomed to during Left and TMC rule.
Nonetheless, the cultural and political impact of this victory for the BJP will be profound. Bengal was the last, and most important, piece of the Hindu nationalist project in the East. A little more than a decade ago, who would have imagined that the major states of eastern and northeastern India — Assam, Bihar, Odisha, and West Bengal — would all be under the BJP?
In addition to infrastructure development and more welfare, there has been an escalation in communalism in BJP-ruled Assam. What course will Bengal take?
Neelanjan Sircar is an associate professor at Ahmedabad University. The views expressed are personal
