Mending fences, minding fences

The BJP's victory in West Bengal is bound to have a significant impact on India-Bangladesh ties

- BY KANU SARDA

On the morning West Bengal’s votes were counted, television screens across the border in Dhaka, Khulna and Rajshahi flickered with flash news.

For perhaps the first time in recent memory, the outcome of a state election in India was being watched in Bangladesh with the kind of anticipation usually reserved for domestic politics. from Bengal like this time," Rubayat Mannan Rafi, executive director of the civil society platform The Bangladesh Dialogue, told THE WEEK. "It is a tumultuous time for India-Bangladesh relationship, and many people are cautiously watching the election result."

As early trends began to stabilise, it became clear that the BJP's strongest gains were coming not from the state's political centres but from its edges—from constituencies like Mathabhanga, Sitalkuchi, Sitai, Dinhata, Natabari and Tufanganj in Cooch Behar district, to Kumargram, Kalchini and Alipurduars in Alipurduar district further north, and stretching southwards into pockets of Nadia, Malda and North 24 Parganas districts that lie along the Bangladesh border. In these districts, migration, identity and security are not distant policy debates; they are lived realities.

The scale of the shift was visible in victory margins. In Cooch Behar Uttar, the BJP won by over 60,000 votes, while in Kalchini the margin crossed 30,000. But these signals of consolidation were not visible everywhere.

Seats like Sitai and Dinhata—where the Trinamool Congress and the BJP, respectively, won with narrow margins—reflected the continued complexity of local politics.

What makes these margins politically significant is that in several constituencies, the number of disputed or ineligible voters flagged during the revision of electoral rolls was comparable to, or even exceeded, the final victory margins.