Verdict Bengal: Decisive win in a divided state

West Bengal was the missing piece in the BJP’s Hindu nationalist project in eastern India. The cultural and political impact of the victory in Kolkata will be profound

- Neelanjan Sircar

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?

(PTI)

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.