New Delhi: it was clear that the BJP had pulled off a stunner in West Bengal. In a house of 294, the BJP, which had nil electoral presence in the eastern state until the 2009 Lok Sabha election, dislodged the formidable Mamata Banerjee-led Trinamool Congress.
It registered a comprehensive win that can’t be explained by the deletion of votes through the Special Intensive Revision of voter rolls alone, which the Trinamool Congress would want people to believe.
The BJP to win the kind of lead it has — 192 by noon — must have polled votes across segments and regions of Bengal.
The BJP appears to have expanded its base in Bengal beyond the North Bengal pockets of Jalpaiguri and Cooch Behar to South Bengal’s Presidency Division, considered the TMC bastion.
Party leaders who gathered to celebrate the win said the victory was more than just an electoral victory for the party.
It is the culmination of a decades-old aspiration of the saffron leaders and a gift and tribute to Syama Prasad Mookerji, the founder of Jana Sangh.
Late Atal Behari Vajpayee had regretted that the BJP which had an electoral footprint in most parts of India was absent from Bengal, the land of its founder.
Besides being an ideological win, the Bengal victory of the BJP also consolidates its eastern advance. The BJP only recently installed its first chief minister in Bihar.
The next stop is Bengal, a state where the BJP had no seats in 2009 and barely a 4% vote share.
It was after Prime Minister Narendra Modi assumed power at the Centre in 2014 that the BJP won two Lok Sabha seats and 17% vote share.
This was followed by consistent gains — 18 of the 42 Lok Sabha seats in 2019 and over 40% vote share, and 77 seats and 44% vote share in the 2021 assembly polls.
