BJP’s Bengal win completes its eastern sweep, marks a watershed moment in Indian politics

As Assembly election trends firm up, they appear to be historic in more ways than one. For this was not just a routine electoral exercise but a political earthquake, shattering old assumptions, burying tired narratives, and sending the Opposition a brutal message: that the BJP is no longer merely a dominant party; it is now the natural party of governance in Bharat.

For years, the lazy consensus, especially in Lutyens’ Delhi, dismissed the BJP as a “north Indian” party that mattered only in the Hindi belt. That illusion now lies in ruins. With its landslide victory in West Bengal and its dominance in Uttar Pradesh, Bihar, Odisha and Assam, the BJP has effectively taken command of eastern Bharat.

More from Opinion

The significance of Bengal, however, cannot be overstated. The state was supposed to be the final ideological fortress: it was the land of Leftism, secular posturing and, of course, minority appeasement politics masquerading as liberalism. This was the state where the BJP was told, again and again, that it did not belong. Yet it is here that the saffron flag now flies highest.

Historically, the result is even more significant. Not since the 1970s has a single party ruled four major eastern states — Uttar Pradesh, Bihar, Bengal and Odisha — while also controlling the Centre. The last such arrangement existed under Congress' dominance. Thereafter, the region fragmented and fell into the hands of regional satraps.

West Bengal was the hardest fortress to breach. The last national party to govern the state was the Congress in the 1970s, before Siddhartha Sankar Ray lost power to Jyoti Basu’s CPI(M) in 1977. What followed was 34 years of Left rule and 15 years of TMC dominance. It took a national party 49 years to smash through Bengal’s political wall. That is what makes this verdict momentous.

Bihar slipped into socialist and caste-based politics with the rise of Lalu Prasad Yadav in 1990. Uttar Pradesh saw Congress dominance collapse by the late 1980s, replaced by ‘Mandal’ and ‘Kamandal’ politics. Odisha, too, moved out of Congress influence as Naveen Patnaik’s long reign pushed the party to the margins.

The 2026 elections, therefore, are not merely a victory. They mark the beginning of a new political order. BJP governments across the region, aligned with the Centre, create the possibility of policy coordination, administrative synergy and faster economic transformation — something the region hasn’t seen, if at all, for decades.

Anga, Banga and Kalinga — denoting Bihar, Bengal and Odisha — were historically among the most entrepreneurial and prosperous regions of the subcontinent. Post-Independence statist socialism dulled their entrepreneurial spirit. As for Bengal, its impoverishment is evident in the mass migration of its people to other regions for work. A state that once attracted job seekers from neighbouring regions now sees its own people leaving in large numbers. A more investment-friendly governance model will now allow Bengal to not just reverse the migratory trend but will also give it a chance to reclaim its civilisational and economic inheritance.

The results also carry serious national security implications. Border states such as West Bengal, Assam and Tripura are strategically sensitive, especially in relation to Bangladesh. Political alignment with the Centre makes coordinated action on illegal immigration, cross-border radicalisation, demographic anxiety and border fencing far easier. In 2026, voters in Bengal — and also Assam — clearly responded to these concerns.

Bengal, in particular, deserves close attention. The BJP’s victory cannot be reduced to one factor. It was driven by 15 years of anti-incumbency against Mamata Banerjee, anger over governance and law and order, resentment against policies seen as tilted towards one minority community, and growing anxiety over Bangladesh after the unceremonious exit of Sheikh Hasina.

The turmoil in Bangladesh sharpened these fears. The rise of Jamaat influence, anti-Hindu violence, and demographic anxieties in border districts were not abstract geopolitical concerns. They were lived realities for Bengal voters. Delhi’s drawing-room liberals may have sneered at them as “majoritarian paranoia”, but Bengal’s voters couldn’t see it that way.

This led to an unprecedented consolidation of Hindu votes. Some analysts may attribute the BJP’s rise to administrative measures such as the Special Intensive Revision (SIR), but that misses the larger political current. Bengal politics has long revolved around the three Ms — Muslim, Mahila and Matua. This time, women, especially from rural areas, moved decisively away from Mamata Banerjee. The Matuas had already begun shifting towards the BJP in the last Assembly elections. Once two spokes of the TMC wheel broke, collapse was only a matter of time.

The broader lesson from the 2026 Assembly election results — a phenomenon that has been consolidating since 2014 — is that political parties perceived as anti-Hindu fare poorly in electoral battles. It’s one thing to be pro-minority; it’s absolutely another to be seen as anti-Hindu. The Congress and its allies still fail to grasp this distinction. They pay for that arrogance at the ballot box.

The Bengal victory of the BJP is doubly sweet for another reason. For a party that swears by Hindutva, Bengal is the motherland where the idea first germinated. In the BJP’s imagination, Bengali identity and the Hindutva soul of Bengal are not opposites; they are inseparable. This is the land which was the birthplace of other Hindutva icons, such as Swami Vivekananda and Sri Aurobindo. To add to it all, this was the place where the party had seen the initial spurt under the leadership of Syama Prasad Mookerjee. For the BJP, Bengal was unfinished business. It no longer is.

The same Hindu consolidation is visible in Assam, where Chief Minister Himanta Biswa Sarma has delivered a third straight victory for the BJP. With this landslide, Sarma now stands with Yogi Adityanath as one of the tallest BJP leaders after Narendra Modi and Amit Shah.

Assam was once considered forbidding terrain for the BJP because of its demography and regional political traditions. Sarma has made the party an invincible election machine in the state. Like Yogi in Uttar Pradesh, he has shown that Hindu vote-bank politics is no longer a contradiction. It is a tested model.

The southern picture is more mixed. The Congress can take comfort from Kerala, where anti-incumbency against the Left Front has brought it back to power. The Left Front has failed to secure a rare third consecutive term, giving the Congress a much-needed political lifeline. However, that success is offset by the defeat of the I.N.D.I. alliance in neighbouring Tamil Nadu, where the DMK-Congress alliance is facing a tough fight from the AIADMK-BJP alliance for the second spot. Vijay’s Tamilaga Vettri Kazhagam (TVK) has come out at the top, though it falls short of the majority mark by about a dozen seats.

Vijay’s rise is historic because it signals that Tamil Nadu is entering another phase of personality-driven politics. The state’s political culture has long been shaped by film stars entering politics, but many believed that era had ended after J Jayalalithaa’s death in 2016 and the failure of Kamal Haasan’s political experiment in the 2024 Lok Sabha elections. Vijay’s rise suggests the return of charisma-driven mass politics in the state.

Taken together, the verdict across Bengal, Assam, Tamil Nadu, Kerala and Puducherry leaves no room for ambiguity: the BJP is the principal winner of 2026. Its victories in Bengal, Assam and Puducherry are transformative, though Bengal alone would have defined this election cycle.

The I.N.D.I. alliance, meanwhile, looks exactly like what its critics always said it was: an arrangement without ideological coherence, organisational depth and even political durability. The Congress survives, but only just. Kerala has given it just enough oxygen to remain alive, but not enough to regain national relevance.

Indian politics has firmly entered a new phase. The BJP now stands at its centre — and the Opposition further marginalised, starkly confused and severely jaundiced.

(Views expressed in the above piece are personal and solely those of the author. They do not necessarily reflect Firstpost’s views.)