There is a formula. Every few years, before every election, the Bharatiya Janata Party deploys it in West Bengal with mechanical, almost touching predictability. Rath Yatras roll across districts. Central leaders fly in from Delhi, Narendra Modi, Amit Shah, Nadda, Rajnath Singh, Dharmendra Pradhan, holding rallies in constituencies they cannot name without a map. Agencies are unleashed. Voter rolls are engineered. And at the end of it all, the people of Bengal walk to the ballot box and reject the BJP with the quiet, firm, almost contemptuous decisiveness of a people who made up their minds long ago.
In 2021, they brought everything. Eight phases, the longest election in India’s history. Modi and Shah held rally after rally. The result? AITC won 215 seats. BJP won 77. The same formula was tried in 2024, and BJP dropped from 18 Lok Sabha seats to 12. They lost all 13 bypolls in a single year, including Madarihat, a seat they had won in 2021. The formula does not work. It has never worked. And the reason it will never work goes far deeper than any single election cycle. It goes to the very bone of what Bengal is, and what the BJP fundamentally is not.
The Numbers Have Already Spoken
Start with the data, because the data is devastating. BJP’s best performance in West Bengal came in the 2019 Lok Sabha elections, when it won 18 seats with 2.3 crore votes,40.64% of the vote share. The gap between AITC and BJP that year was just 17 lakh votes. It felt, briefly, like a breakthrough. BJP operatives spoke of a Bengal wave. Amit Shah spoke of winning 200 seats in 2021.
Then 2021 happened. AITC polled 2.89 crore votes, 48.02%, and won 215 seats. BJP’s vote count actually fell to 2.29 crore, 38.15%, and 77 seats. The gap, which had been 17 lakh votes in 2019, exploded to 60 lakh in just two years. In 2024, AITC won 29 seats with 2.76 crore votes. BJP won 12 seats with 2.34 crore votes. The gap was 42 lakh votes.
The pattern that emerges is clear and conclusive. BJP has polled approximately 2.3 crore votes across all three major elections. Their ceiling has been reached. They are not growing. AITC, meanwhile, keeps expanding, consolidating, deepening its roots. The trajectory does not point toward a BJP victory in 2026. It points toward further erosion.
The Civilisational Mismatch
No amount of electoral arithmetic, however, captures the full depth of BJP’s problem in Bengal, because at its core, the problem is not political. It is civilisational.
Bengal is the land of Rabindranath Tagore, Kazi Nazrul Islam, Ramakrishna Paramahamsa, Vivekananda, Satyajit Ray, and Amartya Sen. These are not merely cultural icons; they are the philosophical architecture of Bengali identity. They ranged from social democratic to deeply humanist to outright secular. The Bengali middle class, which has historically provided cadres for every significant political movement in this state, has been shaped by this tradition. It views the RSS and its ideological project with contempt at best and visceral disgust at worst.
Bengal’s syncretic tradition is not a slogan. It is lived reality. Durga Puja and Muharram have shared the same streets for generations. Bengalis eat hilsa and mutton biryani during festivals regardless of religion. The state’s culinary identity is inseparable from non-vegetarian cuisine,from maacher jhol to kosha mangsho,cutting across caste and community lines. The BJP’s model of governance, by contrast, is one of aggressive cultural policing that seeks to regulate what people eat, how they celebrate, and whom they love.
Look at what BJP has done in states it controls. In Bihar, Deputy Chief Minister Vijay Kumar Sinha announced strict regulations on meat sales, banning open display of meat, requiring vendors to use dark glass panels or thick curtains, prohibiting meat shops within 50-100 meters of religious places or educational institutions. In Uttar Pradesh, similar diktats have been imposed. Bajrang Dal vandalized a Valentine’s Day program at Narsee Monjee College in Indore, attacking students for celebrating love. The newly launched Vande Bharat trains removed non-vegetarian food options entirely, despite being funded by taxpayers of all dietary preferences. This is the BJP’s vision,a surveillance state where the government decides what you eat, how you dress, whom you marry, and which festivals you celebrate.
Bengal will never accept this. The cultural DNA of this state is fundamentally incompatible with the BJP’s project of homogenization. When the BJP talks about “one nation, one culture,” Bengalis hear the erasure of their language, their food, their festivals, their identity. When Amit Malviya says “there is no language called Bengali,” when Delhi Police calls Bengali a “Bangladeshi language,” when Sukanta Majumdar calls the Jagannath Temple an “amusement park,” when Dilip Ghosh questions the existence of Maa Durga,these are not isolated gaffes. These are expressions of a deep ideological contempt for anything that does not conform to the RSS’s narrow definition of acceptable Indian culture.
The BJP’s cultural assault extends beyond insults to active persecution. Over 2,000 Bengali migrant workers have been harassed, detained, or deported in BJP-ruled states over the past year. Sukhen Mahato was lynched in Pune for speaking Bengali. Jewel, a 19-year-old from Murshidabad, was beaten to death in Odisha for speaking Bengali. Mohammad Kabir was tortured in Haryana police custody, his leg broken, for being Bengali. This systematic linguistic persecution creates a visceral, generational opposition to the BJP that no amount of electoral spending can overcome. Bengalis understand that if the BJP cannot tolerate their language in Maharashtra and Odisha, they certainly will not protect Bengali culture in Bengal itself.
Bengal’s political history has been shaped by unions, politicised peasant organizations, community institutions, and a deeply local, grassroots culture of political engagement. BJP, as a party that operates top-down, imports rhetoric from Delhi, conducts rallies in Hindi in a Bengali-speaking state, and offers Hindutva as a substitute for governance, is structurally alien to this ecosystem.
When BJP leaders speak in Hindi to Bengali farmers, they are not making a tactical error. They are revealing a fundamental incomprehension of who they are speaking to. The fishermen of Bantala and the working class of Malda do not vote based on who visits from Delhi. They vote based on who fills their stomach, protects their land, and speaks their language. On every one of those metrics, Mamata Banerjee wins before the campaign even begins.
The Organisational Vacuum
Every political party that has sustained dominance in Bengal has done so through deep, patient, booth-level organisational work. The Left did it for three decades through CITU, AIKS, and a network of politicised mass organizations that penetrated every village and neighborhood. AITC has rebuilt that architecture under Mamata Banerjee, combining welfare delivery with grassroots presence in a way that makes it almost impossible to dislodge.
The BJP has no equivalent. Its expansion in Bengal has been rapid, top-down, and built on a foundation of defectors from other parties rather than loyal cadre. Internal infighting is chronic. Veterans feel sidelined. The booth-level network that decides elections in Bengal is simply not there in the depth that matters.
During the Special Intensive Revision of electoral rolls, BJP appointed 35,651 Booth Level Agents while there are over 80,000 booths. The party, in short, does not have a pan-Bengal organisational presence.
And this organizational weakness is compounded by internal warfare. Yogi Adityanath battles his two Deputy CMs in Uttar Pradesh,Keshav Prasad Maurya and Brajesh Pathak openly undermine him. Vasundhara Raje fights party high command in Rajasthan. Karnataka BJP factions tear each other apart. In Bengal, the situation is even more chaotic. Is Sukanta Majumdar the leader? Dilip Ghosh? Suvendu Adhikari? Samik Bhattacharya? They spend more time fighting each other for relevance than fighting AITC. This isn’t a political party with a clear chain of command,it’s a collection of opportunists waiting for central patronage, held together not by ideology or organization but by the promise of agency protection and ministerial positions if they somehow win.
There is the question of leadership. BJP has no credible local face in Bengal. Their Leader of Opposition, Suvendu Adhikari, was caught on camera saying that tribal elected leaders Birbaha Hansda and Debnath Hansda belong beneath his shoe. A formal complaint was filed against him under the SC/ST Prevention of Atrocities Act. This is the man BJP has chosen to project as their alternative to Mamata Banerjee, a woman who has stood on the streets of Bengal through Singur, Nandigram, and every moment this state needed someone to fight for it. The contrast is not close. It is not even a contest.
The Matua Betrayal
Perhaps no story better captures BJP’s fundamental unseriousness about Bengal than what it has done to the Matua community.
The Matuas are a large Scheduled Caste community, historically significant in Bengal’s electoral arithmetic, particularly in North 24 Parganas. BJP spent years courting them with promises of citizenship under the Citizenship Amendment Act. CAA became the central instrument of BJP’s pitch to the Matua vote bank. Elections were fought on this promise. Seats were won.
Then the truth emerged, layer by layer. The CAA was passed in 2019 but its rules were not framed for four years,the government sought nine extensions from Parliament. Rules finally appeared in March 2024, months before the Lok Sabha elections, confirming what many had suspected: that CAA was always an electoral instrument, not a humanitarian one. When Matua community members actually read the rules, they found that applicants would first have to identify themselves as foreigners, providing detailed documentation of their origin country, their entry into India, and similar documentation for parents and spouses. Many Matuas, who have lived in Bengal for generations, called this a direct threat.
The betrayal was then made explicit by one of their own. Union Minister and Bongaon MP Shantanu Thakur, himself a Matua, casually announced that even if one lakh Matua names were deleted from the voter rolls under the SIR exercise, it would be acceptable. A Union Minister representing the Matua community declared that the deletion of one lakh Matua voters was acceptable. When Matua community members launched hunger strikes against the SIR process, BJP dismissed their protests as a conspiracy involving Rohingyas and Bangladeshi Muslims.
Over 700 fake CAA camps ran across Bengal, reportedly with BJP’s central leadership’s blessing, charging poor people ₹800 each for filing forms and handing out fake identity cards. When some Matua community members were arrested in Maharashtra with these cards, the BJP government there refused to recognize them. The cards were worthless. The promise was worthless. And the community that BJP spent years cultivating with citizenship promises now watches its names being deleted from voter rolls by an exercise BJP championed.
The SIR Disaster: When the Weapon Turned on Its Wielder
If the Matua betrayal exposed BJP’s cynicism, the Special Intensive Revision of electoral rolls exposed something darker: their willingness to kill democracy itself to win an election they cannot win democratically.
The SIR exercise was designed in Bihar, where it delivered exactly what the BJP wanted. In Bihar’s 2025 Assembly elections, the exercise helped the NDA scrape through with a razor-thin majority despite widespread anti-incumbency. Encouraged by this success, the BJP and its Election Commission deployed the same playbook in Bengal, but with far more aggression. The goal was transparent: delete enough voters,particularly minority, SC, and ST voters, to engineer an electoral advantage that ground-level popularity could not provide.
The scale of the assault was staggering. Out of Bengal’s 7.8 crore voters, the SIR process flagged 60 lakh 6 thousand cases for adjudication, with minority-dominated districts facing the most severe targeting. In Murshidabad, there are over 11 lakh cases. In Malda, over 8 lakh. In North 24 Parganas, nearly 6 lakh. In South 24 Parganas, 5.22 lakh. The pattern was not random; it was surgical. Districts with high Muslim, SC, and ST populations,the core of AITC’s electoral base,were subjected to what can only be described as institutional ethnic cleansing of the voter rolls.
The human cost was immediate and devastating. Over 150 people died during the SIR exercise. Halima Khatun and her nine-month-old son Arif Hasan died in an accident while rushing to correct a spelling error in voter records. Daily wage workers abandoned their livelihoods to stand in endless queues, proving they were Indian citizens in their own country. Elderly citizens collapsed. Families were torn apart by the bureaucratic cruelty of an exercise that treated every Bengali as a suspected infiltrator until proven otherwise.
But here is where the BJP’s plan catastrophically backfired.
The Supreme Court intervened. On February 20, 2026, in an extraordinary move, the Court stripped the Election Commission of control over the SIR process and deployed serving and retired judicial officers of “impeccable integrity” to adjudicate the cases. On February 24, the Court expanded the pool to include Civil Judges from neighboring Odisha and Jharkhand. The Court ordered that all documents,including Aadhaar cards and Madhyamik admit cards, must be accepted as proof. The Election Commission’s arbitrary power to reject documents was dismantled. An appellate tribunal headed by a former Chief Justice was established to hear appeals. Supplementary voter lists were ordered to be published continuously rather than being held until after elections.
In short, the Supreme Court eviscerated the ECI’s voter deletion machinery and imposed judicial oversight at every stage. What was designed as a tool to disenfranchise millions became a process to restore and protect their voting rights. Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee’s legal fight, which the BJP mocked as obstruction, was vindicated completely. Every Supreme Court order proved that the SIR was exactly what AITC had alleged: a politically motivated assault on Bengali voters masquerading as electoral roll cleaning.
And then came the final humiliation: after all the deaths, all the harassment, all the disruption, all the terror, the SIR exercise found not one infiltrator. Not one Rohingya. Not one Bangladeshi illegal immigrant. The entire narrative that the BJP had manufactured to justify the exercise, that Bengal was filled with infiltrators who were voting illegally, collapsed into dust. Zero evidence. Zero infiltrators identified. The only thing the SIR produced was 150+ dead bodies, millions of traumatized citizens, and a Supreme Court record of institutional overreach.
What worked in Bihar failed spectacularly in Bengal, and the reason is instructive. Bihar does not have Mamata Banerjee. Bihar did not have a Chief Minister willing to sit on dharna, to take the fight to the Supreme Court, to use every instrument of state power to protect her citizens from central government assault. Bihar did not have the organizational strength to mobilize booth-level agents across 80,000+ booths to ensure people reached adjudication hearings. Bihar did not have the political will to turn the SIR from a bureaucratic weapon into a rallying cry for resistance.
Bengal did. And that resistance did not just neutralize the SIR, it turned the exercise into a political gift for the AITC. Every person who stood in a queue became a witness to BJP’s cruelty. Every family that lost a loved one became a vote bank of grief and rage. Every Supreme Court order vindicating Mamata Banerjee became proof that she was fighting for Bengal while the BJP was fighting against it. The black flags that greeted Chief Election Commissioner Gyanesh Kumar at Kalighat, at Kaikhali, at the airport, those were not organized protests. Those were the spontaneous fury of a people who had been subjected to state-sponsored persecution and came out the other side more determined than ever to reject the party responsible.
The SIR exercise has become a permanent scar on the BJP’s Bengal campaign. In 2026, when voters enter polling booths, they will remember the queues. They will remember the deaths. They will remember that the Supreme Court had to intervene to protect them from their own Election Commission. They will remember that Mamata Banerjee fought for them while the BJP tried to delete them. And they will vote accordingly.
What was meant to be the BJP’s secret weapon became their most catastrophic own-goal. Bihar’s playbook does not work in a state with leadership, organization, and the will to resist. Bengal is not Bihar. And 2026 will prove it conclusively.
The Institutional Assault That Keeps Failing
Unable to win through politics, BJP has turned to institutions. The pattern is consistent and documented. The SIR exercise deleted legitimate voters, killed over 150 people who stood in queues to prove they are Indian citizens, disproportionately targeted minority, SC and ST communities, with 42% of names in Malda’s constituencies alone under adjudication, and found not one infiltrator. Not one Rohingya. The entire exercise, built on BJP’s manufactured narrative of infiltration, produced zero evidence while producing hundreds of deaths and millions of harassed citizens.
When Chief Election Commissioner Gyanesh Kumar arrived in Bengal to review poll preparedness, he was greeted with black flags at Kalighat temple, at Kaikhali, and at the airport. Not by party workers. By ordinary citizens. People who had stood in queues, watched their neighbors’ names deleted, and seen their community members die, all for an exercise that found nothing. That is not a law and order situation. That is a democratic verdict, delivered spontaneously, by people who have had enough.
ED raids, CBI cases, NIA investigations have been used systematically against AITC leaders. Nearly ₹1.96 lakh crore in central dues has been deliberately withheld from Bengal, funds meant for housing, rural employment, and welfare of the state’s poorest citizens. Every instrument of central power has been pointed at Bengal. And Bengal has not bent.
The Verdict
BJP’s trajectory in Bengal is not one of growth. It is one of a party that peaked in 2019, retreated in 2021, contracted further in 2024, and has spent the intervening years deploying every instrument of institutional power to compensate for the popular support it cannot organically generate. Their vote count has stayed static at around 2.3 crore across three elections while AITC has grown. Their organisational presence remains shallow. Their local leadership is discredited. Their central promises to key communities like the Matuas have been exposed as electoral instruments with no intention of delivery. Their manufactured narrative of infiltration produced zero infiltrators and over 150 deaths.
A party wins an election by giving people a reason to vote for it. BJP has spent a decade in Bengal giving people reasons to vote against it, through agency harassment, withheld funds, fake citizenship promises, voter deletion exercises, cultural assault on Bengali identity, persecution of Bengali speakers in their own states, and an ideological project that is structurally incompatible with Bengal’s civilizational DNA. The people of Bengal are not a passive audience for this political theatre. They are active, engaged, and entirely clear about what they want.
In 2021, against every instrument of central power, they gave their answer. In 2024, they gave it again, more emphatically. In 2026, they will give it a third time, with the accumulated weight of fifteen years of evidence on one side and the accumulated weight of BJP’s broken promises, institutional manipulation, and governance failures on the other.
Bengal has decided. It decided a long time ago.
