New Delhi, India – Seema Das, a househelp in New Delhi, took on a two-day journey to reach her village in India’s West Bengal state, changing trains to make sure she got home in time to vote in provincial elections.
Das had previously always voted for the All India Trinamool Congress (TMC) party under Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee, a centrist political force that has been in power in the eastern Indian state since 2011. But this time, she said, her mother-in-law had convinced her that “Didi” – a nickname for Banerjee, which translates to elder sister in Bangla – “favours Muslims”.
Das, a Hindu, added: “Didi has lost the track and only appeases Muslims to stay in power.”
That’s an accusation that Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s Hindu majoritarian Bharatiya Janata Party has long levelled against the TMC, which emphasises religious pluralism and the protection of minority rights. But for 15 years, Banerjee and her party have ruled the state of more than 90 million people, even as the BJP gained ground in a state where it had traditionally been a marginal player.
On Monday, that changed. Modi’s party won West Bengal. Early results from elections to the state’s legislature – which were held in April, but votes were counted on May 4 – show that Modi’s well-oiled election machinery is poised to deliver a thumping majority for the BJP in a state that its ideological founder was from, but that it has never won before. By 4:30pm India time, the BJP had won or was leading in 200 out of the state’s 294 seats, where its previous best performance was 77 seats in 2021. Banerjee’s TMC, meanwhile, was leading or had won just 87 seats.
The West Bengal elections were among five whose results were declared on Monday. In the southern state of Tamil Nadu, actor C Joseph Vijay threw up a surprise, defeating dominant parties to win with his upstart TVK party; in its neighbouring state of Kerala, the Congress party – the largest national opposition party – beat a coalition of left parties. A BJP-led alliance won the self-administered territory of Puducherry, once a French colony. And in the northeastern state of Assam, Modi’s party returned to power with a sweeping majority.
Yet it is the outcome in West Bengal that analysts say is by far the most consequential of the results that were declared on Monday, with the BJP walking the trails of religious polarisation and leveraging underlying anti-incumbency to win, experts told Al Jazeera.
Inside Banerjee’s bastion in East
Banerjee founded the TMC in 1998, breaking with the Congress party, disillusioned with its refusal to frontally take on a coalition of communist parties that had ruled West Bengal since 1977.
Rising from a humble background, the lawyer-turned-student-activist-turned-politician finally defeated the communists to win the state in 2011. Since Modi became prime minister of India in 2014, she emerged as a key challenger to the BJP – framing her politics, especially her defence of Bengal’s Muslims, as an act of opposition to Hindu majoritarianism.
She also launched a series of women-centric welfare schemes and pushed back against controversial land acquisition projects sought by big industry.
“There is visible support for Mamta and she remains popular, but there is anti-incumbency against the TMC machinery, and people were not happy with their interference in everyday life,” said Rahul Verma, an election observer who teaches politics at the Shiv Nadar University in Chennai.
He added that the BJP also ran a better-managed campaign this time, noting that he is not “shocked” by the results. “It was a difficult election for the BJP, but not impossible.”
To Verma, “there was a corridor available to them [in West Bengal], and one can now say everything aligned in a way to produce this outcome for them.”
Verma emphasised that “without serious anti-incumbency, West Bengal would not have gotten this kind of result.”
Nearly 68.2 million people voted in the election, or about 92.93 percent, a record high for the state.
Banerjee’s party failed to “offer anything new to the voters and to beat strong anti-incumbency sentiments against it”, said Praveen Rai, a political analyst at the Centre for the Study of Developing Societies, in New Delhi.
“The party system had turned hostile towards the people who did not subscribe to their ideology,” he argued, adding that “the TMC failed to read the growing resentment against economic deprivation and aspirational needs of the common people.”
Rai added that the loss in West Bengal also weakens Banerjee’s hopes of emerging as a national challenger for Modi’s job.
But the implications of the result extend beyond Banerjee, he said. The BJP’s win, and the TMC’s dramatic defeat, would “decrease the political capital of [all] the parties opposed to [Modi]”.
That’s a major shift from two years ago. In the 2024 national elections, Modi’s party had fallen short of a majority, leaving it reliant on allies’ support for survival. The election wins on Monday “offset the electoral setback” suffered in the national vote, Rai said.
“It substantially increases the national standing of Modi’s leadership and extends the hegemonic power of the party [BJP] to govern India,” Rai told Al Jazeera.
‘BJP ran on Hindu-Muslim polarisation’
Neelanjan Sircar, a senior fellow at the Centre for Policy Research in New Delhi, who travelled across West Bengal before the polls, told Al Jazeera that his team identified “a big urban-rural gap among voters’ preferences”.
“We found urban men are very polarised,” he added. “In Bengal, the Muslim population is disproportionately rural, and given the levels of polarisation, the result ended up in a big difference for the BJP.”
Historically, election analysts have argued that due to the BJP’s Hindu majoritarian politics, the party did not stand a chance of winning West Bengal. More than a quarter of the state’s population is Muslim. “That has, of course, not turned out to be true, something we did pick during our research,” Sircar said.
The BJP has not shied from projecting itself as the party of Hindu voters.
Suvendu Adhikari, leader of the BJP in the state and potential chief minister candidate, said, “There has been a Hindu consolidation [of votes].”
He claimed, however, that many Muslims also did not vote for Banerjee’s TMC like earlier, and got swayed towards the BJP. It is impossible to verify the claim until the Election Commission of India (ECI) has released details of the vote count, expected in the next few days.
“I want to thank every Hindu Sanatani who cast their votes in favour of the BJP,” Adhikari said, referring to Banerjee’s TMC as a “pro-Muslim party”. Sanatan Dharma is an endonym for Hinduism.
For the BJP, the win in West Bengal is also deeply symbolic: Shyama Prasad Mukherjee, who founded the Bharatiya Jana Sangh – the forerunner of the BJP – in 1951, was from the state.
Al Jazeera reached out to TMC spokespersons but has not received any response.
Pre-poll voter revision in spotlight
Before the polling in West Bengal, the ECI carried out a so-called revision of its electoral rolls through a Special Intensive Revision (SIR), which authorities have conducted in more than a dozen states so far.
The exercise in West Bengal controversially removed more than nine million people – nearly 12 percent of the state’s 76 million voters – from the voting list, snatching their right to cast a ballot in the elections.
Nearly six million of them were declared absentee or deceased, while the remaining three million were unable to vote because no special tribunals could hear their cases in the short timeframe available before the elections.
Banerjee’s TMC and other opposition parties in several states have called out the discrepancies in the revision of the voter list, accusing the ECI of siding with Modi’s BJP. Right activists and observers believe that the exercise disproportionately disenfranchised Muslims before the election.
Banerjee also appeared before India’s Supreme Court, challenging the “opaque, hasty, and unconstitutional” revision process. The top court did not restore the voting rights of millions affected but directed the ECI to publish a list of affected voters.
“Once the question of whether ‘I should be on the voter list’ became the dominant question for vulnerable populations, it’s not politics as usual,” said Sircar. “The level of polarisation that the voter revision caused is something that people outside the state do not really grasp.”
The Modi government also deployed 2,400 companies of paramilitary troops to West Bengal for the elections – a record for such provincial votes. The federal government claimed this was to assist election officials in carrying out the exercise without fear of political violence.
But the TMC and other opposition parties argued that the forces served to intimidate – or influence – voters.
“The heavy presence of security forces could have also created a favourable situation for the BJP,” argued Verma, of Shiv Nadar University. “Those who might be fence sitters and might have been afraid of TMC’s machinery on the ground were moved by this.
“There is no doubt that the trust level between opposition parties in India and the Election Commission of India is very low,” added Verma.
However, the analysts who spoke with Al Jazeera, including Sircar and Verma, agreed that the voter revision exercise alone could not have delivered such a decisive victory for the BJP – and that it reflects several other factors, including anti-incumbency and religious polarisation.
Still, analysts said, Banerjee will likely not go out without a fight.
In her first reaction to the vote counting, Banerjee addressed her party workers in a video statement, calling all workers and leaders not to leave vote-counting booths until the last ballots are counted.
“It’s a total forceful use of central forces to oppress the Trinamool Congress everywhere, breaking offices, and forcibly occupying them,” she said. “We are with you. Don’t be afraid. We will fight like the cubs of a tiger.”
Those aren’t empty warnings, Sircar said. “We are definitely in for drama.”