'Governance Failure So Colossal Trinamool Couldn't Hide It': Amit Malviya To NDTV

The lotus is blooming now in the land of Bharatiya Jana Sangh founder Shyama Prasad Mukherjee. To see such a day had been a foundational dream of those who have been with the organisation that eventually evolved into the BJP.

One of the BJP leaders who have worked hard on the ground for months is Amit Malviya. The brain behind the party's IT cell, Malviya's expertise in sending the right message to the people has earned him a reputation as an efficient communicator, a skill which the BJP has always said incompetent Opposition leaders mislabel out of spite.

"It's indeed a very emotional moment. It's a moment that will be etched in history forever, and I'm delighted to be a part of it," Malviya told NDTV on the BJP's first ever assembly election victory in Bengal, long ruled by the Left before Mamata Banerjee's Trinamool Congress came.

Today, not only her party Trinamool Congress, but Banerjee herself lost her Bhabanipur seat to the BJP's Suvendu Adhikari.

Explaining the factors that propelled the BJP to over 200 seats as against the Trinamool's distant 79, Malviya said the credit goes to teamwork and the BJP's relentless effort to stand up and fight again after the loss in 2021.

"But what we must realise is that perhaps the story of the misgovernance of West Bengal never made it to the national media, and the draconian regime that Trinamool was, the regional media was also never allowed to carry large parts of it," Malviya said.

"But the failure was so colossal that it just kept erupting every now and then. Law and order was a big issue. Women's security was a massive concern for people. Infiltration, lack of governance, no administrative reform for decades, and just about everything that could go wrong with the state was the case," the BJP leader who leveraged his social media prowess to shine light on what he called the Trinamool's hidden side, told NDTV today.

He added that a state that was once known for its industrial prowess and entrepreneurship was relegated to the back and beyond, falling to the lowest rung of the pyramid as far as performance of states go.

"I think that it started reflecting in the daily lives of people, and this mandate is a reflection of that," Malviya said, adding the BJP's win can't be attributed to only one particular moment where things started going the BJP way.

"I think there was a very strong, silent undercurrent as far as change was concerned, and I remember speaking to NDTV when Bihar elections came, and I said this, that people are going to vote against this government and in favour of the BJP. And I guess the analysts may never be able to point it out because they were never listening," Malviya said.

"They perhaps were just too consumed by their own idea of what may work and what may not work. The fact of the matter is that people's silence was taken as their consent for the regime that was in power. And that is something that changed dramatically in the last 10 days. I know there were people who came from Delhi and went back and said, 'oh, Mamata is coming back to power'," he told NDTV, adding these same people perhaps did not travel to interior Bengal.