Straight talk | Bengal has spoken, this is Hindutva's greatest victory

For roughly three decades, a particular argument circulated freely in India’s English-language media, its think tanks, and its university common rooms. It went something like this: Hindutva was a political project of the cow belt, rooted in a vegetarian, upper-caste, landlocked conservatism that would never travel to coastal, fish-eating, intellectually restless Bengal. The Bhadralok — Bengal’s educated, culturally sophisticated middle class — was too worldly, too steeped in Tagore and Vivekananda and the Bengali Renaissance, to succumb to what was variously described as majoritarian populism or organised communal sentiment. Bengal was different. Bengal was immune. The results from May 5 have settled the argument.

The BJP won 207 seats in the West Bengal Legislative Assembly election, against a majority mark of 148 in a 294-seat house. Mamata Banerjee, who had governed the state for 15 years across three consecutive terms, lost her own Bhabanipur constituency to BJP’s Suvendu Adhikari by a margin of 15,105 votes. Adhir Ranjan Chowdhury, the Congress strongman who had held Baharampur for years, fell to the BJP’s Subrata Maitra. The voter turnout was 92.47 per cent, the highest recorded in West Bengal since Independence. These are not the numbers of a party that eked out a narrow victory in difficult terrain. These are the numbers of a political realignment.

To understand how dramatically this has shifted, go back to the trajectory. In the 2016 assembly election, the BJP won 3 seats in West Bengal. Three seats, out of 294. In 2021, despite a high-profile national campaign, the party won 77 seats — a significant leap, but still not enough to dislodge Mamata Banerjee, who returned to power with 213 seats. Five years later, the same party has crossed 200 seats in the same state. No serious commentator predicted this a decade ago. The few who suggested it was possible were dismissed as wishful thinkers by the same intelligentsia now scrambling to explain what happened.

What happened was not a fluke and it was not manufactured, whatever the opposition now claims.

The TMC’s response to its historic defeat has been to allege that the election was stolen. The party has pointed to the Special Intensive Revision exercise conducted before the election, during which over 90 lakh names were removed from voter rolls, as evidence of rigging. It has accused the Election Commission of delaying counting to favour the BJP. What they cannot do, however, is explain away a 92.47 per cent turnout — the highest in the state’s post-Independence history. Elections do not get stolen at that level of participation. When nine out of ten registered voters turn out in a state of 10 crore people, the result reflects the public’s will, not anyone’s manipulation of it.

The opposition’s insistence on contesting the result is also, in part, a recognition of how devastating that result actually is. The entire architecture of INDIA alliance politics in Bengal rested on the assumption that regional identity, embodied in Mamata Banerjee’s Bangla pride campaign and her consistent framing of the BJP as an outsider imposition, would hold. It did not hold. The state’s voters looked at 15 years of TMC governance — the corruption scandals, the school jobs scam, the cattle smuggling networks, the political violence — and decided they had seen enough. The BJP offered an alternative. Bengal took it.

Now to the argument that will make liberal commentators most uncomfortable. The BJP’s Bengal campaign did not look like the BJP’s campaigns in Uttar Pradesh or Madhya Pradesh. It was not built around cow protection or dietary restriction. It actively embraced Bengal’s food culture. Prime Minister Narendra Modi made an unscheduled stop at a College More roadside stall for jhalmuri during campaigning.

The BJP’s communications in the state were saturated with fish, with mustard, with the everyday vocabulary of Bengali food culture. This was not accidental. It was a direct challenge to the caricature of Hindutva as a vegetarian, upper-caste, culturally narrow project that had no place at a Bengali table. This was a deliberate strategic choice, and it worked.

What this reveals about Hindutva as a political and cultural project is more nuanced than either its supporters or its critics typically acknowledge. The version of Hindutva that has historically been caricatured — as the exclusive preserve of vegetarian, upper-caste north Indians suspicious of coastal and eastern India’s food habits and cultural practices — has clearly evolved or was always more capacious than its opponents gave it credit for. Bengal’s Hindus include meat and fish eaters across every caste. They celebrate Durga Puja on a scale unmatched anywhere in India. They have a long and living tradition of both the Shakta and Vaishnava strands of Hindu practice. The BJP found ways to speak to that tradition without demanding that it conform to a narrow Gangetic plain template.

The Bhadralok dimension deserves separate examination. This was the constituency most confidently predicted to resist the BJP. The Bhadralok — educated, urban, historically left-leaning, with a cultural self-image tied to Bengal’s reformist and literary tradition — were supposed to be the firewall. Kolkata and its surrounding districts were supposed to hold for the TMC. They did not hold, or at least not entirely. The fact that a state renowned for producing India’s intellectual class, for its Nobel laureates and its filmmakers and its poets, has produced a decisive BJP majority is an empirical fact that demands honest engagement rather than condescension.

One honest engagement might go like this: across large parts of rural Bengal, particularly in border districts with Bangladesh and in areas with significant demographic change over decades, Hindu voters have felt a specific anxiety that was so far not addressed with any seriousness. The BJP addressed it directly. Whether one agrees with the BJP’s framing of that anxiety or not, dismissing the voters who responded to it as gullible or manipulated is both analytically lazy and politically self-defeating for anyone who wants to understand what Indian democracy is actually doing.

The scale of this victory also has implications that extend well beyond West Bengal. Bengal was the last large state where the opposition could point to an entrenched regional party successfully holding the BJP at bay through a combination of welfare schemes, identity politics and anti-BJP coalition management. That model has now been broken in what was supposed to be its strongest laboratory. The argument that the BJP cannot win where it does not already govern, that there is a cultural ceiling beyond which Hindutva cannot travel, has collided with the results from 294 constituencies spread across one of India’s most politically self-aware and intellectually alive states.

The people of West Bengal have voted. They did so at record rates. The results are what they are. The arguments that were confidently made about what Bengal would and would not accept have been tested against reality and found wanting. That is how democracy is supposed to work.