Yearnings for desired change, continuance, and constructive stability have been particularly discernible factors in the outcome of the Indian state Assembly polls in West Bengal, Assam, Tamil Nadu, Keralam, and Puducherry. Among them, the eastern state of West Bengal has drawn spiralling attention and displayed very high stakes in this election. Here, the incumbent Trinamool Congress (TMC) regime was desperate to continue in power, while its political opponent, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), was determined to oust it from power.
The smashing defeat of the TMC regime in Bengal is the aftermath of an accrued, proliferating discomfort among its electorate. The BJP has pulled off a resplendent victory. Out of 294 seats in the state assembly, it won 207 seats; the TMC won 80 seats. The BJP successfully impressed the electorate that it would be a worthy alternative dispensation in the state.
The TMC governed for an uninterrupted stint of 15 years in West Bengal. It came into power in the summer of 2011, riding the crest of a tidal wave of unrestrained support for the party and its unquestioned supreme leader, Mamata Banerjee. The then jettisoned CPI(M)-led Left Front ministry had ruled for an unbroken period of 34 years, beginning in 1977. It had breached the end point of people’s exasperation towards its perennial highhandedness, arrogance, corruption, repression, self-seeking, and socio-economic regressive policies. Ultimately, Mamata and her party colleagues were given adherence to become a coherent political alternative. Consequently, the Left Front regime was overthrown in the 2011 state polls. Mamata averred that she would restore Bengal’s eroded glory and ensure the ecumenical uplift of its people.
However, subsequently, as West Bengal’s chief minister, she grievously erred somewhere. Ensuring a smattering framework of reasonable administration, she, her nephew Abhishek Banerjee, and several party leaders of the TMC apparently thought that they could all increasingly indulge in making the proverbial hay while the sun shone.
Post-2011, Mamata and her party successfully won two state Assembly elections and notable numbers of seats from West Bengal during parliamentary elections. Some setback in the parliamentary elections of 2019 to the BJP was seemingly overcome with subsequent sweeping victories in municipal elections and the state Assembly elections of 2021. During the Parliamentary elections of 2024, out of 42 seats from West Bengal, the TMC won 29 seats. All this kept Chief Minister Banerjee, her nephew, and many TMC leaders buoyed. They thought they could continue with their disconcerting state of affairs. They blissfully believed that the state would be without any credible political opposition; people would be compelled to continue voting for them for a stable government. But the wider political firmament had undergone crucial changes.
The Congress Party had been replaced by the BJP as the governing party at the federal centre in New Delhi since 2014. Thereafter, the BJP eventually secured for itself the seeming pole position in the Indian political scene. During the first few years after forming the government at the centre, the BJP, under the leadership of Prime Minister Narendra Modi, concentrated in winning the state elections in sundry states of north and western India. 2019 onwards, it successfully expanded its political influence in eastern and north-eastern states. The BJP’s political watershed in eastern India was achieved when it won state polls in Odisha in 2024 and in Bihar in 2025. Influential regional parties had politically lost out to the BJP’s seemingly credible counter-narrative to the people of the concerned states. In West Bengal, the BJP had also made its presence discernible. The TMC apparently chose to ignore it in hubris.
Other alleged unacceptable practices of the TMC regime gained increasing credibility. They were blatant corruption, instances of outrageous occurrences in government medical colleges and hospitals in the state, undesirable syndicates in certain economic spheres, alleged mafia groups in several sectors, unacceptable and outrageous appeasement of a certain so-called minority community, instances of illegal infiltration, unwarranted continuation of some disorganized economic activities in the state and political arrogance of the TMC, led to proliferation of popular anger and social discontent in West Bengal.
The BJP, under the leadership of PM Modi and other union ministers such as Amit Shah and Rajnath Singh, successfully highlighted and censured these issues while campaigning for the West Bengal state Assembly elections. The TMC could not respond with credible and successful repartees.
Mamata’s dispensation has contributed successfully to West Bengal’s infrastructure. The long-awaited thrust to Bengali economic enterprises, which had earlier been languishing under Left Front rule, was encouraged. Several welfare schemes for the needy were formulated and implemented. The tourism sector of the state became highly admired during her governance.
But the negative aspects significantly eclipsed the positive policies of Banerjee’s administration. That has led to her and her party’s political Waterloo at present. Notably, she has also lost her own seat to her former party colleague, who is currently her implacable political foe and a leader of the state BJP, named Suvendu Adhikari.
It is a fervent hope that the new BJP state government in West Bengal would be led by able, well-meaning and competent Bengali leaders; they would give effect to the inspiring articulations made during the election campaign. Subsequently, the Indian state of West Bengal would be governed ethically, effectively and in bona fide.
The writer is a political analyst and commentator.
