West Bengal has fallen to the Bharatiya Janata Party for the first time, and the meaning of that result cannot be limited to a tired Trinamool Congress machine. It is bigger than that.
A state long described as one of the last eastern walls against Hindutva politics has been breached. The BJP won more than 205 seats in a 294-member assembly, ending fifteen years of Trinamool rule and pushing one of India’s loudest opposition leaders, Mamata Banerjee, into a corner from which she is now alleging conspiracy and electoral capture. Four people were reported killed in post-poll unrest.
A serious reading of Bengal cannot deny TMC’s corrosion either, because allegations of corruption, local coercion, the arrogance of long rule and the daily suffocation produced by party networks gave many voters reason to seek change. The question is not whether voters had grievances. They did. The question is what kind of political force harvested those grievances, and what minorities must now expect from a party whose record across India shows that governance and majoritarianism are no longer separate files.
That is where Bengal becomes a national alarm.
Before the vote, the revision of electoral rolls became the central stain on the election. Reports say millions of voters were removed or marked ineligible under the Special Intensive Revision process, with minorities, including Muslims, disproportionately affected.
No democracy can survive if the poor, the elderly, the migrant, the widow, the informal worker and the minority citizen are forced to defend their existence before they can defend their politics. To a citizen already living under the shadow of the Citizenship Amendment Act, detention centres, and the poisonous vocabulary of “infiltrators”, it is nothing short of a glaring warning.
In BJP-ruled states, anti-conversion laws have been expanded or tightened in the name of preventing fraud and coercion, though rights monitors have repeatedly warned that these laws are used against Christians and Muslims; providing angry mobs with a legal cover. The hijab ban in Karnataka turned schoolgirls into symbols of national defiance for the simple act of dressing according to conscience. Meanwhile, Bulldozer demolitions, sold as action against illegal construction, have repeatedly followed communal clashes and protests and have fallen with particular force on Muslim homes, shops and livelihoods.
From the looks of it, minorities may live in India, vote in India, pay taxes in India and sing the anthem in India, yet their citizenship remains available for audit by the majority.
The BJP’s triumph in West Bengal gives it not only a state government, but it also gives it a new laboratory in a region whose culture had long embarrassed the homogenising fantasies of Delhi. *