Head-on | How Western media changed its tone after West Bengal landslide

The West’s legacy media has never made a secret of its animosity towards the BJP and Prime Minister Narendra Modi. Soon after the 2024 Lok Sabha election, which reduced the BJP to 240 seats, The Economist wrote: “Modi’s illiberalism may imperil India’s economic progress.” London’s Financial Times warned that PM Modi has a “darker side” and discriminates against minorities.

British policy think tank Chatham House said that “democratic backsliding could eventually prompt Western nations to review their cooperation with New Delhi.” Bloomberg reported that the “progressive South is increasingly drifting away from the poverty-ridden north and its majoritarian leader.”

Much of the criticism before the five assembly elections in 2026 was based on what the bureau chiefs of foreign news media picked up from Delhi’s old ecosystem.

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Foreign bureau heads in Delhi tend to be mid-career journalists. India is a stepping stone to postings in Beijing or Berlin. But while they are here, they socialise with the abandoned debris of the old ecosystem that despises Modi and the BJP.

In the run-up to the 2026 state assembly elections, the narrative was set in stone: Mamata Banerjee’s Trinamool Congress (TMC) would teach PM Modi’s BJP a lesson for daring to weed out, through the Special Intensive Revision (SIR) exercise, unregistered voters who were deleted from the voters’ list as being either dead or illegal migrants.

The cavalry

A travelling circus of journalists led by a global investor swept through West Bengal and came to the conclusion that Mamata Banerjee would win a fourth term as chief minister. The old ecosystem was thrilled at the prospect of the victory propelling Mamata Banerjee as a national leader and challenger to Modi in the 2029 Lok Sabha election.

Bureau chiefs of foreign media posted in New Delhi were delighted. Surely, this could lead to Modi’s long-deserved comeuppance.

The script changed by the evening of May 4. Not only had Mamata Banerjee’s Trinamool Congress been routed by the BJP in a landslide, Banerjee herself had been humiliated, losing her longtime safe seat of Bhabanipur.

Western mid-career journalists have a strong sense of reputational self-preservation. Their narrative changed overnight.

The BBC declared: “For years, India’s West Bengal was the great exception to Narendra Modi’s political advance. With more than 100 million people, West Bengal’s electorate is larger than Germany’s, turning its election into something closer to a nation choosing a government than a routine Indian state poll.”

“A BJP victory there would rank among the most significant breakthroughs of Modi’s 12-year reign. It is not merely the defeat of a three-term incumbent, but the completion of the party’s long march into eastern India,” it continued, adding: “Analysts see the outcome not as a sudden upheaval but as the culmination of a decade-long political project. Unlike the BJP’s rapid rise in Tripura or its earlier breakthrough in Assam, Bengal was never a lightning conquest.”

According to a chastened Guardian, “The result will have significant implications for India’s political landscape and deal another demoralising blow to the already weakened opposition. Modi said in a statement that the West Bengal assembly elections ‘will be remembered forever. People’s power has prevailed and BJP’s politics of good governance has triumphed. I bow to each and every person of West Bengal’.”

Not all, however, were happy with PM Modi’s victory, which could transform India’s relationship with its volatile neighbour Bangladesh from hostility to cooperation.

Writing for eurasiareview.com, Dr Habib Siddiqui warned: “The unthinkable has happened. What I had feared for the past five years has now come to pass: the Bharatiya Janata Party, under the ideological leadership of Narendra Modi, is set to form the next government in West Bengal. Suvendu Adhikari — whose record of incendiary, anti-Muslim rhetoric has dragged political discourse to new lows — appears poised to become the state’s next chief minister. For a state long celebrated for its pluralism, cultural sophistication, and resistance to communal politics, this moment marks a profound rupture.”

A new era

Few have forgotten the role of Western media in parroting Pakistan’s false narrative after Operation Sindoor exactly a year ago. CNN’s senior international correspondent Nic Robertson, reporting from Islamabad, took his cues from Pakistan’s spy agency ISI without embarrassment or apology.

The West Bengal verdict has deeply offended the travelling band of Indian and foreign journalists who predicted a sweeping Mamata victory. They have targeted SIR for the BJP’s win. SIR eliminated the core base of the Trinamool Congress – illegal migrants. Clearly, it was their vote that had kept Mamata in power all these years.

In the 2021 assembly election, Trinamool recorded a vote share of 48 per cent against the BJP’s 38 per cent. In 2026, Trinamool’s vote share dipped to 40 per cent while the BJP’s vote share climbed to 45 per cent. SIR had removed around 10 per cent of unregistered voters from West Bengal’s electorate. The 8 per cent fall in Trinamool’s vote share between 2021 and 2026 reaffirms the belief that illegals had helped it to stay in power.

What accounts for the rise in the BJP’s vote share from 38 per cent in 2021 to 45 per cent in 2026? A combination of Hindu vote consolidation and the removal, after SIR, of the fear of intimidation by illegals and criminal elements within Trinamool’s party cadre.

Meanwhile, the influence of Western media in India is waning. Few watch CNN or BBC. Their growing irrelevance, however, has not improved their journalism out of India. It won’t until they stop seeking unfiltered information from a gnarled and frustrated old ecosystem.

(The writer is an editor, author and publisher. Views expressed in the above piece are personal and solely those of the author. They do not necessarily reflect Firstpost’s views.)