The Special Intensive Revision (SIR) is widely perceived to have triggered the record turnout in the first phase of the West Bengal Assembly election, making the moment appropriate to ask a counterfactual question: what if the BJP is unable to improve upon the 77 seats it won in 2021, and fails to bag even 100 seats? The figure 100 is a significant threshold, as no principal Opposition party has ever managed to get this many seats. The ruling formation has always, in fact, commanded a two-thirds majority in the Assembly.

Linked to this stunning fact are two other oddities of the State’s electoral history: from 1977 until this year, the ruling dispensation was dislodged not by a single party, but by an alliance of political outfits. The Left Front turfed out the Congress in 1977, and the Trinamool Congress and the Congress combined to terminate the Communist rule of 34 years.

The second oddity of Bengal’s electoral history is that these two alliances won the Assembly election after they had bagged the number one position in the preceding Lok Sabha election. Before the Left Front came to power in 1977, it had, months before, swept the post-Emergency parliamentary election in West Bengal. Likewise, the Trinamool Congress-led alliance thumped the Left in 2009, bagging 26 of 42 Lok Sabha seats in West Bengal, before Mamata Banerjee became the State’s Chief Minister in 2011.

These three apparent coincidences of history suggest there is consensus among a large mass of voters to support an entity over multiple cycles of elections, and that they alter their political choices after judging from the Lok Sabha election whether the principal Opposition formation has the capacity to supplant the ruling party in the Assembly election. Their thinking makes sense, for a State government has a far greater bearing on the quotidian existence of people than the Central government.

Unfortunately for the BJP, it failed to outdo the Trinamool in the 2024 Lok Sabha election, bagging 12 seats to the latter’s 29. Worse, this represented a drop of six seats from the 18 it had bagged in 2019, four behind the Trinamool’s tally of 22. The BJP can, obviously, buck the trends of history, it can on its own win a two-thirds majority, without having furnished proof of its ability to trump the Trinamool in 2024. After all, Prime Minister Narendra Modi has impressive firsts to his credit.

Yet, all analyses of the SIR that the BJP organised through its proxy, the Election Commission of India, show the intent behind the mammoth exercise was to disenfranchise Muslim and women supporters of Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee. The SIR, indeed, is a tacit admission by the BJP that despite a decade of communal polarisation and relentless raids on Trinamool leaders to project them as corrupt, it cannot wean away the Hindu supporters of Banerjee—it doesn’t vie for the support of Muslims, anyway—in substantial numbers to grow its 38 per cent of votes, bagged in 2021, to dethrone her, let alone win two-thirds of Assembly seats. It, therefore, chose to wield the weapon of SIR to illegitimately whittle down her voter base of 48 per cent.

The BJP is hobbled in expanding its support base largely because it lacks a leader who has spearheaded the politics of agitation long enough to win popular confidence, a point Professor Maidul Islam, of Kolkata’s Centre for Studies in Social Sciences, made to me. Islam said, “Jyoti Basu led agitations for two decades, became Deputy Chief Minister in 1967, and Chief Minister 10 years later, in 1977. Mamata Banerjee was at the forefront of Opposition politics from the 1990s before she became Chief Minister in 2011. In contrast to them, Suvendu Adhikari, the BJP’s face, is a turncoat, who was with Banerjee until 2020.” Adhikari, in other words, doesn’t command substantial political capital to inspire confidence in the people.

The Left’s orphaned voters

Much of the BJP’s growth in Bengal has been driven by Left and Congress voters jumping on the Hindutva bandwagon. But their switch was gradual: from just 4 per cent of votes in 2011, when the Trinamool-Congress alliance dislodged the Left from power, the share grew to 10 per cent in 2016, and then soared to 38 per cent in 2021. These figures illustrate that the voters in Bengal, in 2016, still thought the Left-Congress alliance was the most viable entity to counter Mamata’s Trinamool.

In 2021, however, the voters deserted en masse the Left-Congress alliance, with its share of votes shrinking from 39 per cent in 2016 to a poor 10 per cent. Undoubtedly some of them would have been votaries of Hindutva, but didn’t vote for the BJP as it wasn’t a viable electoral entity. A segment of them would have been converted to Hindutva because of the BJP’s development slogan.

But the most important reason for the Left-Congress alliance shrinking was because their voters, political scientist Zaad Mahmood said to me, began to perceive the “BJP as a party of refuge” from the Trinamool’s dominance, electorally as well as physically. The violence experienced in the 2013 three-tier local body election reached its apogee in 2018, with a shocking 34.2 per cent of 58,692 seats witnessing victories without contest.

Not too surprisingly, they saw in the BJP a possible “new shelter” to escape the Trinamool’s wrath. This impression was bolstered by Modi’s retaliatory strikes against Pakistan for avenging the Pulwama bombing, which projected him as a strongman who wouldn’t countenance intimidation. The BJP clocked 39.1 per cent of votes in the 2019 Lok Sabha election, but couldn’t expand it in the subsequent Assembly election. Its vote share, in fact, dipped by one percentage point.

This was partly because Banerjee restrained her cadres from engaging in unbridled intimidation, reflected in only 9.48 per cent of seats in the 2023 local body elections going uncontested. Partly, it was also because Banerjee widened the ambit of her welfare schemes.

Adding to the BJP’s failure to expand its base is the “logical discrepancy” that has emerged between its intent to organise the SIR and its outcome. It has disenfranchised not only a segment of Muslims, but also that of subaltern groups like the Matuas and Rajbanshis, non-Bengali speaking migrants, and even upper-caste, upper-class Hindus. For every person disenfranchised, a slew of his or her relatives too have been alienated.

Should the BJP stumble in the Assembly election and fail to bag 100 seats, a search will be sparked among Opposition voters for a counterweight to the Trinamool, more so in case the Left and the Congress, fighting separately this time round, win some seats. Both drew a blank in the last Assembly election. Perhaps the Congress is better placed in this regard, for, as a national party, it can hope for Muslims to return to it in the Lok Sabha election at least. This could complicate the BJP’s quest to conquer West Bengal, which the party covets with the suitor’s passion and the conqueror’s zeal.

Yet a caveat from history: in the 1971 Lok Sabha election, when Indira Gandhi’s Congress swept much of the country, West Bengal stood firm behind the Communists, who took the top slot in the State. However, in the 1972 Assembly election, the Congress-led alliance emerged victorious, by organising massive rigging. History will repeat itself should the BJP win the Assembly election, for its victory, too, would be credited to the voter list manipulation, a 2026 version of old-fashioned rigging.

Ajaz Ashraf is a senior journalist from Delhi and the author of Bhima Koregaon: Challenging Caste.

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