Just two years ago, India’s Prime Minister Narendra Modi was gifted a win that many said looked like a defeat.
But since then, his ruling Bhartiya Janta Party (BJP) has been victorious in election after election, culminating this week with a conquest of West Bengal, a state that had long eluded the saffron outreach.
The landslide victory saw Mr Modi’s party triumph over the All India Trinamool Congress Party (TMC), the incumbent for 15 years, winning 207 of the 293 seats.
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Psephologist, Axis My India founder and managing director, Pradeep Gupta, told the ABC that a combination of factors, including anti-incumbency, deteriorating law and order, and the BJP’s performance in other states, was behind the decisive win.
Then there was the women factor, with West Bengal rocked by incidents of brutality, including the rape and murder of a trainee doctor at the RG Kar Medical College in 2024.
The mother of the victim, who accused the TMC government of shielding the culprits, fought and won a seat for the BJP in the election.
“There were so many atrocities … the rape and murder in RG Kar … we are talking about women’s security.”
Mamata refuses to accept defeat
However, TMC’s firebrand leader Mamata Banerjee, who has also lost her Bhabanipurseat to the BJP’s Suvendu Adhikari, has refused to accept the defeat, saying she will not resign.
Speaking outside the counting booth on Monday, local time, she accused the government of having “stolen” the election from her. Earlier, she cited the strong presence of central security forces intimidating her supporters.
Ms Banerjee also blamed the Election Commission of India’s Special Intensive Revision, or SIR, an exercise undertaken regularly to verify and revise electoral rolls, for removing her support base, in particular Muslims.
The revision, which was also conducted in Kerala and Tamil Nadu, saw 9 million voters deleted, roughly 12 per cent of the electorate in West Bengal.
However, both BJP and the TMC interpret it differently, with BJP saying the exercise culled ineligible voters whose inclusion inflated the voter list to favour Ms Banerjee.
Mr Gupta said SIR had taken place in most parts of the country, not just West Bengal.
“People who were working outside the state [returned] … made sure they voted, and they voted in big numbers.”
The BJP’s national spokesman, Guru Prakash Paswan, said SIR was “purely a constitutional, legal, lawful exercise”.
“Any allegations … are unfounded,” Dr Paswan told the ABC.
“A peaceful voting must be a priority for a democracy.”
He said West Bengal had given Mr Modi a mandate for politics that fundamentally reoriented governance toward direct delivery, welfare inclusion, and aspirational citizenship.
“The people of Bengal have endured decades of political violence, broken promises, and stalled aspirations,” Dr Paswan said.
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