From the Editor-in-Chief

India saw two major electoral upsets on May 4. Of these, actor Vijay’s victory as a wildcard debutant in Tamil Nadu was the more genuine surprise. But the imperious sweep of West Bengal by the Bharatiya Janata Party was the more truly historic outcome. True, the party had made a phenomenal leap from three seats in 2016 to 77 in 2021, becoming the main Opposition party and reducing the Left to insignificance. Yet this was a state long regarded as saffronism’s ideological frontier, a terrain too culturally self-assured and politically idiosyncratic to succumb to the BJP’s offerings. The verdict has demolished that assumption. In an astonishing turnout of 92.5 per cent, Bengal gave the BJP 207 seats in a 294-seat legislature. Mamata Banerjee’s Trinamool Congress, doughty fighters to the bitter end, were reduced to 80 seats. With that, an entire political epoch draws to a close and another begins. The result also reshapes India’s political map in significant ways ahead of the 2029 Lok Sabha election. The footprint of Narendra Modi’s BJP now covers all of eastern India, alongside much of the north, west and northeast.

How was this tectonic shift achieved? For Prime Minister Modi and his strategist-in-chief, Union home minister Amit Shah, Bengal represented the most intricate puzzle they had confronted. This was not a territory where the Ram Mandir symbolism would suffice. It had vast tracts of Muslim concentration that gave Mamata her famous “30 per cent head start”. Unlike its traditional strongholds, the BJP did not start with the automatic backing of the top two or three powerful castes: Bengal’s opinion-making classes were cosmopolitan and left-liberal by leaning. In the rural swathes, the Trinamool ran its fiefdom through entrenched patronage networks and pure muscle power via fearsome cadre squads and franchisee dons. The BJP’s local unit was more of a rag-tag army, with only Suvendu Adhikari counting as a leader to reckon with. It seemed a bridge too far.

Our cover story gives you perhaps the most exhaustive, most illuminating narration of how it was crossed. Senior Deputy Editor Anilesh S. Mahajan breaks down the inside story of ‘How Bengal Was Won’ to two tiers. The first, on the sheer scale and precision of the campaign, reads like a masterclass in organisational logistics. An outreach that produces a 45.9 per cent vote share doesn’t happen overnight. The first step came in 2022, with the installing of a field commander: BJP general secretary Sunil Bansal. A loan to the party from the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, he embodied all its qualities: low-profile, strategically inclined, and a bit of a virtuoso at grassroots organisation. After the setback in the 2024 general election, Bansal saw that the BJP’s personnel deficit could only be fixed through the RSS volunteer base. Thus, the entire panoply of Sangh affiliates swarmed out over Bengal. Two years were spent building the effect seen on May 4. Booth by booth, meeting by meeting, bloc by social bloc, voter by voter. Bansal himself visited all 294 constituencies over 10 times.

The second layer lay in BJP’s messaging across Bengal’s vast and variegated social landscape. This blended the universal and the hyper-specific, the emotive and polarising appeal of Hindutva married to a micro-segmented outreach tailored to each region and caste. For the first, Mamata’s perceived Muslim tilt had already prepared the ground. The reports of violence against Hindus in Bangladesh, peaking in late 2024, played right into the BJP’s stoking of anxieties over Muslim dominance in border districts. Recurring clashes in hotspots like Murshidabad kept the pot simmering, with a reported ‘exodus’ of 400 Hindu families in 2025 heightening the narrative of unfairness. Party-backed evangelists like Kartik Maharaj, given the Padma Shri in 2025, addressed public gatherings that amplified the religious mobilisation.

Yet what often escapes notice amid the focus on Hindutva is the BJP’s parallel Mandal-style social engineering. The Mahishyas, the agrarian middle-caste Adhikari belongs to, the Telis and trading castes like the Sahas, who together number an estimated 15 million and dominate key regions, were promised long-denied OBC reservations, with communal rhetoric slathered on top. Kolkata’s Bhabanipur, where Adhikari defeated Mamata, is one of Bengal’s most heterogeneous seats, and here the segmental approach reached its apogee. Even micro-groups like the 1.6 million Marwaris and even fewer Sindhis and Gujaratis, all cosmopolitan Kolkatans, were wooed. The lassoing in of the Adivasi in the western tribal outback by the Vanvasi Kalyan Ashram, of the Rajbongshis of the north and the Namasudras and Matuas of the south was the work of years. Not a sliver was left untended, right up to voting day. A split in the Muslim vote, already shrunk by the controversial Special Intensive Revision of electoral rolls, meant the BJP exceeded its own expectations.

We also feature detailed analyses of the Vijay phenomenon that swept away M.K. Stalin’s DMK in Tamil Nadu, Himanta Biswa Sarma’s saffron wash in Assam and the Congress’s consolation triumph over Left veteran Pinarayi Vijayan in Kerala. But the main story, with inputs from Assistant Editor Arkamoy Datta Majumdar in Kolkata, is Bengali. Modi, despite 40-odd visits, chose not to make it about himself. Instead, his dhuti-panjabi and jhalmuri symbolism capped the BJP’s endeavour to mould itself in native flavours. Its success can be mapped in a simple figure: the BJP and allies now rule 20 of India’s 28 states. With the Opposition in tatters, they seem Unstoppable.