Winning Bengal Was The Hard Part For The BJP... Governing It May Prove Even Harder

A BJP government in Bengal inherits more problems than it might care to admit at its moment of triumph, points out Ramesh Menon.

History was made in West Bengal on May 4, 2026. Many had considered it unthinkable that the state would take on a saffron hue in the near future.

The Bharatiya Janata Party, which held exactly three seats in the Bengal assembly a decade ago, has stormed past the 148-seat majority mark in a 294-seat House, winning 206 seats.

This is not about a change of government or a chief minister. This is a political earthquake in eastern India. Bengal was one of the last major states where the BJP had no foothold.

The Trinamool Congress, which ruled this state with an iron grip for 15 unbroken years, was unable to withstand anti-incumbency sentiment.

What worked for the BJP

The BJP's victory in Bengal was not built in a day, nor on a single issue. It was a carefully layered campaign that combined national muscle with local grievances, identity consolidation with governance critique, and a structural reshaping of the electorate.

Suvendu Adhikari, the BJP's state face, was characteristically blunt in his post-result analysis, saying there had been Hindu consolidation and that Muslims, who traditionally vote for the TMC, had not this time voted for the party in the numbers they once did.

What he was saying was that religious polarisation had worked in this election.

Battling anti-incumbency

Then there was the anti-incumbency that the TMC had to battle. Fifteen years is a long time to be in power. There was widespread dissatisfaction over jobs, corruption, governance and law and order -- a growing feeling that the Mamata government had grown stale, arrogant, and unaccountable.

Prime Minister Narendra Modi, campaigning in Murshidabad, reminded voters that the TMC government had allegedly stood by the accused in the R G Kar hospital rape and murder case. The 2024 rape and murder of a trainee doctor at Kolkata's R G Kar Medical College marked the moment when the TMC's relationship with urban, educated Bengali women began to fracture irreparably. The streets erupted in protest across the state. Voters were angry, and the image of governmental apathy stayed with them.

The Sandeshkhali Shame

If the R G Kar case broke the TMC's hold over urban Bengali women, Sandeshkhali broke it in the villages.

In January 2024, when Enforcement Directorate officers visited the remote riverine village of Sandeshkhali in North 24 Parganas to interrogate local TMC strongman Sheikh Shahjahan over a food rationing corruption scandal, they were attacked by his supporters. Shahjahan fled, remaining a fugitive for 55 days before his arrest. What followed was worse.

Local women came forward with allegations of systematic sexual harassment and land-grabbing against Shahjahan and his TMC associates Shibu Hazra and Uttam Sardar, men who, they alleged, ran the area like a private fiefdom.

The West Bengal governor described the situation as 'ghastly, shocking, and shattering.'

The TMC's response was initially defensive, slow to act, and focused on discrediting the women rather than the accused.

It was politically disastrous.

The party suspended Shahjahan only after his arrest.

Sandeshkhali became a symbol of what happens when a ruling party's local machinery is answerable to no one, and the most vulnerable pay the price. For women voters across rural Bengal, it was a wound that did not heal.

The Recruitment Scam

Corruption in public recruitment, particularly the school teachers' appointment scam involving systematic bribery for government jobs, formed a devastating line of attack for the Opposition.

For a young Bengali desperate for a government job, this was personal. It hurt deeply.

Central agencies had been investigating Trinamool Congress leaders, and the trials kept the scandal alive in public memory throughout the election campaign.

West Bengal's share in India's GDP was declining. Investments and industries were leaving the state. There were no jobs on the horizon.

The state had accumulated a debt of more than Rs 8 lakh crore. Against a backdrop of other BJP-ruled states transforming economically, the comparison stung.

Re-engineering the Electorate

This is where the BJP's victory becomes both decisive and deeply controversial.

The Special Intensive Revision of the electoral rolls removed around 91 lakh (9.1 million) voters. That was roughly 12% of Bengal's electorate. Of the 27 lakh (2.7 million) whose status remained pending before tribunals, roughly 65% were Muslims.

According to the Sabar Institute, which conducts public policy research, 34% of those removed from the voting list were Muslims, a community that makes up around 30% of the state's population.

Under sustained attack from Mamata Banerjee, the BJP defended this as eliminating bogus entries and illegal migrants from Bangladesh.

Critics called it targeted disenfranchisement.

Whatever the intent, the effect was to reduce the relative electoral weight of the community that votes most solidly against the BJP.

Speaking in Jangipur, in Muslim-majority Murshidabad, Modi promised to implement the Uniform Civil Code to end what he called 'the politics of appeasement', asserting that the BJP would not allow Bengalis to become a minority in their own state.

This was a deliberate appeal to a fear that has grown over the years, rooted in Bengal's Partition history and inflamed by anxieties over demographic change along the Bangladesh border. It worked.

What Went Wrong for the Trinamool Congress

The TMC's collapse from 215 seats in 2021 to 81 in 2026 is one of the most dramatic falls from grace in modern Indian electoral history.

How did a party with a seemingly unassailable grassroots machine, a welfare delivery system, and an aggressive leader collapse so completely?

Answer: Mamata's Machine Became a Monster...

The TMC's political dominance had for years been maintained through a system of local strongmen, booth-level control, and what critics called 'syndicate raj', the capture of local contracts, sand mining, and construction by party loyalists.

The so-called Diamond Harbour model, built around Abhishek Banerjee's stronghold, had long relied on administrative dominance rather than genuine grassroots support. It was a model of control and coercion, not governance.

There was a plethora of party-affiliated 'clubs' run by TMC strongmen who would extort money under the guise of allowing shops to operate, starting small businesses, securing contracts, or even funding Durga Puja celebrations. Voters had tolerated it for years, but were growing tired of institutionalised corruption and goondaism.

Then there was the nephew problem that the BJP capitalised on. The TMC machine had come largely under the control of Mamata's nephew Abhishek Banerjee, who was himself under investigation by central agencies.

The party's dynastic direction and the perception of Abhishek as a parallel power centre alienated long-standing TMC loyalists, particularly upper-caste Hindu and former Left voters, who shifted towards the BJP.

The Welfare Trap and the Freebie War

The TMC campaigned on its welfare schemes -- Lakshmir Bhandar, Kanyashree, housing benefits, and many more. However, in districts such as Jangalmahal, tribal and OBC voters were increasingly shifting from identity-based voting to performance-based evaluation.

Welfare schemes alone were no longer sufficient to secure loyalty where economic stagnation was the lived reality.

When the TMC promised cash doles to shore up its base, the BJP refused to be left behind, pledging Rs 3,000 per month for women, compared with the TMC's Rs 1,500.

Nobody was asking the obvious question: Given a state already drowning in debt that grows year on year, where exactly would the money come from?

It is an uncomfortable question that the new BJP government will have to answer sooner than it would like to.

The Muslim Factor: Fear and Fury

The collapse of the Muslim vote, long considered the TMC's impregnable fortress, warrants deeper examination. Bengal's Muslims, who make up nearly 30% of the state's population, entered this election not only politically fractured but also frightened.

The CAA's explicit exclusion of Muslims from its citizenship provisions, combined with the SIR's disproportionate removal of Muslim names from voter rolls, created a climate of deep anxiety across the Bangladesh border districts.

In village after village, ordinary Muslim families feared they could be stripped of citizenship -- declared stateless on their own land.

Muslim migrants who work in low-paid jobs across India dipped into their savings to travel to West Bengal to vote, afraid that if they did not do so, their names would be struck off the electoral rolls and their citizenship would be questioned.

The community entered this election disempowered in multiple ways. The BJP fielded no Muslim candidates. Even the TMC fielded only 47 Muslim candidates, which is just 16% of its total nominations, far below the community's share of the population.

The numbers tell a stark story of declining political representation.

In 2006, the West Bengal assembly had 46 Muslim MLAs. Under the TMC, this rose to 59 in 2011. By 2021, polarisation had already pushed it down to 42. The 2026 assembly may well record the lowest Muslim representation in over two decades in a state where Muslims make up nearly a third of the population.

Challenges Ahead for the BJP Government

A BJP government in Bengal inherits more problems than it might care to admit at its moment of triumph.

The most immediate constraint is the crushing debt burden. The state's total debt is projected to be over Rs 7 lakh crore-Rs 8 lakh crore.

Interest payments alone account for more than 20% of total revenue receipts, severely limiting what any government can spend on development.

Even with the much-promised 'double engine sarkar', fiscal consolidation will take years and entail painful choices.

The new government will also have to clear numerous dues that the Centre had withheld from the Mamata government's accounts on charges that it was not in order.

Then there is the law-and-order challenge. The TMC's political violence network is localised, entrenched, and decades old.

The crude bomb culture, the booth-level muscle, and the syndicate raj in construction and mining are not merely party problems but deeply rooted local power structures.

Replacing one set of strongmen with another set wearing saffron would be self-defeating.

BJP leaders have promised to speed up citizenship processing under the CAA.

In border districts where the fear of being declared stateless is already palpable, the implementation of the CAA and any associated NRC exercise will be the single most combustible issue the new government faces.

The BJP also promised to reverse Bengal's industrial decline and attract investment that the TMC allegedly drove off.

West Bengal's spending on physical infrastructure had declined from 5.3% of total expenditure in 2018-2019 to 3% in 2022-2023, well below the national average.

Reversing this will require not only political will but also fundamental improvements in law and order, land acquisition processes, and bureaucratic culture. None of these can be addressed quickly.

Bengal has always had a strong, proud, and distinct cultural identity.

The TMC expertly milked Bengali asmita.

The BJP's centralising instincts and its Hindi-heartland cultural idiom sit uneasily with a state that produced Tagore, Netaji and Satyajit Ray, a literary and artistic tradition that regards itself as second to none in India.

A BJP government perceived as Delhi's administrative outpost rather than as Bengal's own will face a backlash that may not be an electoral issue today but will become one in the next election.

This result completes a political map that would have seemed impossible fifteen years ago.

The BJP is now the dominant political force across virtually all of India, except the south.

Bengal was the last major eastern bastion to fall.

Mamata Banerjee is not finished. At 71, she still has plenty of fight left in her. She is too resilient and too combative a politician to simply exit the stage.

The era she defined, characterised by vernacular populism, welfare statism, and fierce regional identity, has been defeated by a sharper, harder, more nationally coordinated version of the same political logic.

Bengal has voted for change.

Whether it delivers the change it actually needs, such as transparent governance, jobs, safety, and dignity for all its citizens, regardless of faith, will be the real test of the BJP.

Winning Bengal was the hard part.

Governing it may prove even harder.

Ramesh Menon, an award-winning journalist, educator, documentary filmmaker and corporate trainer, is the author of Modi Demystified: The Making Of A Prime Minister.

• Battle For 5 States

Feature Presentation: Aslam Hunani/Rediff