KOLKATA/New Delhi: “Chor, chor (thief),” BJP supporters chanted when Abhishek Banerjee, the chief minister’s nephew and second-in-command, walked into the Sakhawat Memorial Girls School on Monday, where votes from Mamata Banerjee’s own constituency were being counted. By afternoon, Bengal had turned saffron — and Banerjee’s 15-year government had been voted out in a political upheaval that carries the same shape as 2011, when her own street agitations ended 34 years of Left rule.
The BJP is set to govern Bengal for the first time since Independence. The TMC’s vote share collapsed from 48% in 2021 to 40.8% — a loss of more than 7 percentage points. Banerjee lost her own constituency, Bhabanipur, by 15,105 votes. The decisive shift came in the second phase, covering 142 seats: BJP, which won just 18 of those in 2021, won 66 on Monday. Turnout rose sharply, with 63.4 million votes cast at 93%, against 59.9 million and 82.3% five years ago. To many observers, the BJP’s Bengal win is the biggest political moment for the party since the 2014 Lok Sabha victory that installed Narendra Modi at the Centre.
“It is basically a lack of rule of law that the people of Bengal voted against,” said Abhirup Sarkar, former economist with the Indian Statistical Institute. “Everyone suffered, especially industries and business, due to extortion and crime. This is the first time both Hindus and Muslims wanted to vote against the TMC.”
The middle class and upper middle class, he added, shunned TMC specifically for governance failure — a pattern most visible in Kolkata, where BJP swept seats Banerjee’s government had long held. “In districts where big leaders are based in Kolkata, TMC has not done well.”
Before the first vote was cast, the election had been shaped by a special intensive revision (SIR) of the electoral roll notified in October 2025. Of 76.6 million registered voters, 9.1 million names were removed — 6.3 million dead and absentee voters and 2.7 million declared ineligible after adjudication. Banerjee accused the BJP of using the Election Commission to delete her supporters’ names; a proactive EC and security forces, a Congress candidate who asked not to be named noted, helped produce the surge in turnout.
The seeds of Monday’s result, however, were planted across 15 years. In 2012, Banerjee’s decision to pay ₹2,500 monthly to Imams and ₹1,500 to Muezzins drew a Calcutta High Court ruling in 2013 that the payments violated constitutional guidelines on secularism. The state rerouted them through the Waqf Board.
The gathering tide
Corruption cases — Saradha, Narada — stayed in focus through the years but failed to dent TMC in 2016. Banerjee won a sweeping majority in 2021, months after which UNESCO added Durga Puja to its Intangible Cultural Heritage list. She raised the Durga Puja grant from ₹10,000 in 2018 to ₹1.10 lakh in 2025, a total outlay of ₹495 crore. “Mamata Ji toh Durga puja karne nehi deti,” she said sarcastically at this year’s rallies, mimicking her critics from the Hindi belt.
Professor Sarthak Roychowdhury of Gokhale college cited TMC’s minority consolidation strategy as having triggered a Hindu counter-consolidation, compounded by the Bangladesh developments and the rape and murder of a doctor at RG Kar hospital. “Education, medical facilities and employment became the biggest casualties.”
Banerjee attempted to counter the polarisation with temple projects — a ₹250-crore Jagannath temple at Digha, inaugurated in June 2025, and a ₹344.2-crore Mahakaal temple near Siliguri, whose foundation she laid in January. The BJP’s election song, “Paltano dorkar, chai BJP sarkar” (We need a BJP government because change is necessary), blared from loudspeakers even in Kalighat, where Banerjee has lived since childhood. The correction had come too late.
The waning support
The Muslim vote, on which TMC had depended, fractured. Nawsad Siddiqui’s ISF and Humayun Kabir’s AJUP each won two seats; parties beyond the four main formations claimed 4.6% of the vote — 2.19 million ballots that, under a different distribution, would have protected TMC in marginal seats.
Jawhar Sircar, former Trinamool Congress MP, was unsurprised. “Bengali Hindus voting for the BJP doesn’t mean communalisation of society — they did so out of sheer disgust,” he said, adding that Muslim voters, too, had reason to feel abandoned: Muslims constituted 5% of Bengal’s police force in 2011 and 4.5% in 2026.
Professor Udayan Bandopadhyay of Kolkata’s Bangabasi College noted that the BJP arranged trains for approximately 2.2 million migrant workers — many driven out of Bengal by lack of employment — to return and vote.
Women voters, previously Banerjee’s most dependable constituency, appeared to shift as well. The BJP’s promise of ₹3,000 a month directly undercut Lakshmir Bhandar — the TMC scheme paying ₹1,500 to general category women and ₹1,700 to SC/ST women — and moved votes in seats where the differential was decisive.
Despite Mamata blitz
At 71, Banerjee had campaigned ferociously: 90 rallies, 22 roadshows in two months, numbers no BJP heavyweight or TMC apparatchik matched. Yet political analyst Debasish Dasgupta said the result exposed a structural weakness no personal effort could paper over. “It is a party that relied entirely on Mamata’s image rather than its organisational strength. It also depended heavily on the perks of power and had zero ideological base.”
Several TMC leaders, unwilling to be named, conceded that Banerjee’s drive to make Bengal opposition-free during her first term had become the cause of her downfall — breaking the Congress alliance within a year of 2011, pushing the BJP into the political vacuum, and starting the polarisation that concluded on Monday.
“Just as people voted against the Left in 2011,” Dasgupta said, “they did so against TMC in 2026.” For Mamata Banerjee, who walked into Jadavpur as a youth Congress leader in 1984 and remade Bengal through the agitations at Nandigram and Singur, the accounting arrives with particular weight.
