Opinion | For BJP, Bengal Won't Be As Easy As Bihar

Getting the details right in West Bengal, on culture, history and politics, is not easy; the land and its people are complicated. Storytelling is invariably different from the factual details; when in 1895 Acharya Jagadish Chandra Bose wrote his magnificent 'Bhagirathir Utsa Sandhane' ('In Search of the Origins of the Bhagirathi'), being a scientist, he was precise and particular. His search was for the origins of the river, Bhagirathi, because, in his words, “Right from the days of my childhood, I have felt a deep friendship with the river.” 

The Ganga does flow through the doab into Bihar, then Jharkhand, and finally, West Bengal; it then splits into the Bhagirathi and the Hugli and the Padma. It does flow down to the sea, creating on its journey the world's largest delta, but not alone. It is joined by the Meghna, that is the Brahmaputra in this mighty endeavour, along with a lot of tributaries that snake through the landscape of Bengal and the Sundarban. 

Why This Matters

As a metaphor of the principal river of the North of India, the name Ganga is just about perfect; the facts as they are may be a different matter. Politics requires a magical mix of both, and Prime Minister Narendra Modi was entitled to frame the next election battle for ousting the redoubtable Mamata Banerjee and her Trinamool Congress from power in West Bengal in terms that would be widely understood. It is only nit-picking Bengalis who would question the statement for veracity.

Why does any of this matter when electoral politics is an intensely fierce competition where the winner takes all? It matters because the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) has worked hard to win in West Bengal ever since 2019, when it captured 18 of the total of 42 seats in the Lok Sabha elections, getting a little over 40% of the vote share against the reigning Trinamool Congress's 29%. The BJP's gains in that election were at the cost of the Trinamool Congress, the Congress and the Communist Party of India-Marxist (CPI-M)-led Left coalition. 

By the time the 2021 state assembly election were scheduled, the BJP was gung ho that it would win close to 200 seats out of the total of 294 seats in the West Bengal state assembly. It won 77 seats and 38.7% of the votes after it poached a slew of Trinamool Congress heavyweights, including Suvendu Adhikari, who defeated Mamata Banerjee as a candidate for the Nandigram seat in East Midnapore. Since then, the BJP's strength in the state legislature has declined to around 65 seats with defections and losses in by-polls.  

Bengal Is Very, Very Different

Despite the setbacks, the BJP has not given up its indefatigable quest to win in West Bengal. It is entirely right that as BJP's star campaigner and the architect, along with Amit Shah, of the series of wins in Maharashtra, Haryana, Delhi now Bihar, Modi should be impatient to win in West Bengal. Astute as the Prime Minister is politically, he knows that the task is easier said than done.

Unlike in other states, the BJP in West Bengal is fighting a lone battle against a powerful and successful regional party that is culturally savvy and has mastery in knowing how to stir up Bengali nationalist emotions to serve political ends. It has no partners like the Eknath Shinde's Shiv Sena or Ajit Pawar's Nationalist Congress Party (NCP) in Maharashtra, nor does it have partners, small but significant as they are, in Uttar Pradesh. 

Multiple Contenders In Bihar

In Bihar, the wave of support that lifted the National Democratic Alliance (NDA) was set off by Nitish Kumar on the one hand and possibly Chirag Paswan; the Janata Dal (United) (JD-U) almost doubled its seats from 43 in 2020 to 79 in 2025; the Lok Janashakti Party (LJP) scored a massive increase from a single seat in 2020 to 19 in 2025. The BJP's seat share improved from 74 in 2020 to 91 now, making it the single largest party in the Bihar state assembly, a position that it has worked hard to attain,

In contrast, in West Bengal, the BJP is up against not only the ruling Trinamool Congress headed by a leader who has till now effectively fought off the attack, but also up against the CPI(M), which maintains that it is regaining some pockets of support that it lost so spectacularly in 2011 to Mamata Banerjee and the Congress, which, in turn, has a new team of leaders who are hungry to win. The 2021 state assembly election wiped out both the Congress and the Left, but that did not make these parties irrelevant in West Bengal, because the defeats did not demolish the bases of these parties, even if it shrunk them.

What Ails Mamata

On paper, the Mamata Banerjee government, after three tumultuous terms in office is facing strong anti-incumbency sentiments. The shocking revelations of corruption among her most trusted lieutenants within the Trinamool Congress and the government, the outrage reflected in spontaneous street rallies after the brutal murder and rape of a young doctor at RG Kar Medical College and Hospital, followed by other incidents of rape, are the big-ticket issues; it is the everyday experiences of people dealing with the Trinamool's local bahubalis (muscle-men and power-brokers) that has generated serious discontent with the government she runs. A constant stream of gossip in the state is about the links between her nephew and probably heir apparent Abhishek Banerjee, as also about corruption, though incontrovertible evidence for it is missing. 

What Being A 'Bengali' Means

Language as a marker of identity matters in West Bengal, as it does in Bangladesh. Bengali may be the national language of Bangladesh, but it is the universal language of people who call themselves Bengali, regardless of citizenship. The BJP in search of its core constituency in West Bengal has made illegal migrants from Bangladesh its key campaign issue. In this, the confusion it has created for itself is that illegal migrants are not only Muslims; there are more Hindu illegal migrants than Muslims in West Bengal. The Dalit Matuas are not the only people who came across the international border in successive waves from 1947; there are millions of non-Matua Hindus who also did. 

By virtually taking ownership for the Special Intensive Revision (SIR) of electoral rolls by the Election Commission to produce “pure electoral rolls” and then launching its five-plus district exercise to persuade illegal Hindu migrants to sign up for the Citizenship (Amendment) Act, the BJP has blundered. It has instilled fear and distrust within the Hindu vote bank it cultivated so assiduously as a constituency.  

The Misstep With The 'Ghuspaithiya' Issue

Focused on conflating illegal migrants with Muslims, or, “ghuspaithiyas”, the BJP missed the link and overlooked the problem, that proof for inclusion in SIR affected Hindus as it did Muslims. To Hindu illegal migrants, the issue is their own sense of security, the assurance that documents like a ration card, a voter ID card, an Aadhaar card, or MGNREGS job cards are convincing evidence of their status. By seeking these documents, they were not into being appeased; they were interested in proving they belonged. 

By endorsing one Delhi policeman's description of Bangladeshi as a language and then adding for good measure that there is no Bengali language, the BJP has inadvertently confirmed the allegations made by Mamata Banerjee and the Trinamool Congress, that it is a party of “outsiders". The BJP should have been careful when Assam Chief Minister Himanta Biswa Sarma ordered the police to take action against a Congress leader in Karimgang for “disrespect to India” because he recited Rabindranath Tagore's 'Amar Sonar Bangla' ('My golden Bengal'), which, incidentally, is the national anthem of Bangladesh. It prompted a political outcry, with the CPI(M) organising rallies to sing the words at street corners. 

Details Are Important

It has been the BJP's singular weakness in West Bengal that it never quite gets the cultural, historical and political details right. And these details matter. The Bengali, rich and poor, intellectually curious or an exhausted daily wage earner, is hyper-sensitive about identity, language and status; there is pride and a deeply embedded sense of being 'better'. 

The BJP has celebrated 150 years of the 'Vande Mataram', written by Bankim Chandra Chattopadhyay with the music set by Rabindranath Tagore; the point is the national song and the national anthem were both written by Bengalis. It, therefore, does the BJP no good to impute that 'Jana Gana Mana' was written in praise of George V's visit to India, nor for a BJP leader to argue that Tagore and Thakur are not interchangeable. It does the BJP no good either when Raja Ram Mohan Roy, the tireless champion against sati who succeeded in getting it banned, is attacked as a lackey of the Muslims, though it is true that he was appointed as envoy by the Mughal Emperor Akbar II in 1831. 

Mamata Banerjee certainly faces a tough challenge to retain her powerful grip on West Bengal as it prepares for the 2026 state assembly election. Anti-incumbency is strong, and the disgruntled belong to all classes. Her strength, like Nitish Kumar's, are women voters, who have demonstrated their loyalty over and over again. Her strength is her targeted schemes for specific demographic groups, especially youth and new voters, who outnumber all other demographic groups - and, her strategy of including sections of people through her years in power, giving them a sense of being sensitive to their problems and needs. A pre-election cash handout such as the Bihar Mukhya Mantri Mahila Rojgar Yojana boosted the Nitish Kumar government's appeal; that was a move that worked because the NDA was an incumbent government. The BJP in West Bengal does not have the advantage of a base that an incumbent government provides. Its transactions with voters will have to be done differently.

(Shikha Mukherjee is a senior journalist based in Kolkata.The views expressed are personal)

Disclaimer: These are the personal opinions of the author