It is epic. It is emphatic. It is epochal. The Bharatiya Janata Party’s landslide victory in West Bengal is all combined together. How herculean the task was that even the pollsters did not gather enough courage and confidence to draw conclusions from the exit poll data they had collected, which clearly showed a BJP victory. Famed pollster Pradeep Gupta, who seldom goes wrong, did not reveal his exit poll figures, as his team had faced victimisation at the hands of the Trinamool Congress government in West Bengal. By the way, Gupta was the only pollster who had predicted actor Vijay’s victory in Tamil Nadu.
At best after the exit polls, the pollsters only gave an “edge” to the BJP over the TMC. That is because defeating Mamata Banerjee in West Bengal was thought to be unimaginable. She had been winning continuously since 2011, when she uprooted the 34-year-long communist rule from West Bengal. It was widely said Mamata has a decisive edge in Bengal as 27 per cent Muslim votes were presumed to be with her anyway.
According to the last census held in 2011 there are 27 per cent Muslims in West Bengal. It is widely believed that the figure may have gone up to 30 per cent during the last 15 years of TMC rule. The Muslims would vote en bloc for the TMC. That is why it was said Mamata opens her account with 30 per cent votes already in her balance. She required only 20 per cent from the 70 per cent Hindus. That was the calculation everyone believed in. She had been doing it all these elections.
Added to that was the brutal force the TMC used to hoodwink the opponents. There was an atmosphere of fear unleashed on opponents. Anyone suspected of having opposed or voted against TMC would be intimidated. In Falta assembly segment, where re-polling is being held on May 21, the TMC cadres had reportedly put perfume on BJP buttons on the EVMs to identify people who voted for it so that they could be intimidated later on. Some EVM machines reportedly had the BJP buttons sealed with tape so that even if anyone voted for the BJP the vote wouldn’t get cast.
This was the extent of manipulation the TMC would resort to. No matter how much security paraphernalia would be on the ground, such things could still be carried out without getting noticed by anyone and not even the polling agents of the BJP.
The anti-BJP ecosystem in the country is completely shell-shocked over the BJP’s victory and the TMC defeat. Imagine its problem. Why did the Election Commission of India depute such a huge number of central security forces in the state for the smooth conduct of elections?
For this ecosystem, electoral violence was acceptable as long as the BJP got defeated. The Congress felt the pinch after one of its workers was hacked to death by the TMC goons, provoking Rahul Gandhi to remark that it was not democracy but TMC terrorism prevailing in Bengal. But even then the party sounded soft towards Mamata and the TMC.
Also read: All eyes on Bengal
The TMC leadership sounded so arrogant even till the last day. Its leaders Derek O’brien, Kalyan Bannerjee, Mahua Moitra, Sagarika Ghosh, Sayoni Ghosh and Riju Dutta were issuing open threats to everyone right from Prime Minister Narendra Modi, Union Home Minister Amit Shah and IPS officer Ajaypal Sharma. They had apparently taken victory for granted without realising that the same people who turn you into stars, can turn you into dust within no time.
The BJP has now completely conquered north, west and east. South, except Karnataka remains to be conquered. In Karnataka, it has formed a government on its own and in alliance many times. Tamil Nadu and Kerala remain completely out of reach for the party so far.
West Bengal’s win is not ordinary. The state so far strongly resisted the BJP’s advent. In the 2021 assembly elections, when there was a lot of hype, the party could only manage to win 77 seats. In 2024 its parliamentary tally came down to 12. But since then, the party has focused its full attention and energies on 2026 assembly elections. The tremors of the Bengal earthquake for the opposition will be felt far and wide and in the times to come, in all likelihood well beyond 2029.
Two most important allies in the opposition INDIA bloc—the TMC and DMK have been defeated. They indeed do have the numbers in the Parliament, but both these parties have lost their respective states of Bengal and Tamil Nadu. This is obviously a grave setback and correspondingly great advantage for the BJP. Although the party did not have any high stakes in TN, it had aligned with the AIADMK, which failed to make any impact with the new entrant Vijay scripting a spectacular win on his maiden attempt.
The 2024 General Election results were a setback for the BJP in general and Prime Minister Narendra Modi in particular. The party came down from 303 to 240 seats and could barely save the government. Had the party lost just 20 seats more, it could well have ended up in the opposition. And the BJP learned from that setback which could have turned into a disastrous defeat. Since then, the BJP has not looked back having won Maharashtra, Haryana, Delhi, Odisha, Bihar and now Assam and Bengal.
This is probably people’s way of compensating Prime Minister Modi for whatever happened in 2024, when he fell short of an absolute majority by 32 seats for the first time.
The Bengal elections have reaffirmed people’s trust in PM Modi’s leadership and the organisational skills as well as fighting spirit of Union Home Minister Amit Shah, who has not given any excuse to the opposition for the loss of Bengal, where the elections were free, fair, peaceful and without any threat, fear or intimidation.
Follow us
