'Opportunity To Fix Economic Gap': Sanjeev Sanyal On BJP's Bengal Win

The Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) has created history, securing its first-ever victory in the West Bengal Assembly elections. The result could help address India's long-standing east-west economic gap, according to economist Sanjeev Sanyal. 

Speaking to NDTV, Sanyal said, "Bengal results open an opportunity to fix India's east-west economic gap."

He noted that the commonly discussed north-south divide was not the real issue. "People talk about the north-south gap, but that is not the gap at all. The real gap is the east-west gap," he said, adding that the eastern half of India is much poorer than the western half, "and the heart of that is West Bengal".

Sanyal pointed out that the state, once a major economic hub, has seen a long-term decline in its economic share. "There is now an opportunity to begin to fix something that went wrong in the 1950s or in the immediate post-Independence period," he said.

Sanyal said that soon after independence, a series of economic policies did not serve the interests of eastern India, which led to a decline in the region's economic standing. 

West Bengal, he noted, has gone from being the third-largest economy in India even after partition - accounting for around 11 per cent of the national economy - to now contributing barely about 5.5 per cent. "There is now an opportunity to not only bring back West Bengal but all of Eastern India," he added.

"This is not about one or two years of work. It will take at least a decade of hard work to revive Kolkata and West Bengal," Sanyal said.

The BJP marked its imprint in the West Bengal Assembly elections 2026 by winning 206 seats, while the Mamata Banerjee-led Trinamool Congress (TMC) secured 80 seats. With this mandate, the BJP ended the TMC's 15-year rule in the state.

West Bengal had long been a stronghold of the Left, led by the CPI(M), before the TMC came to power in 2011.