West Bengal’s verdict is more than an electoral transition; it is a correction. The people have not merely voted out a government, but rejected a political culture that romanticised disorder, normalised impunity, and mistook excessive empathy for moral virtue

West Bengal has voted: voted with determination, courage, clarity and finality. In that unmistakable vote lies not merely a political verdict, but a psychological one. The people of Bengal did not simply change a government; they actually repudiated a culture — a culture of decades-long accommodation of lawlessness dressed in the language of compassion, a governance model that protected the predator while rendering the victim invisible.

The new administration inherits both an opportunity and an obligation. What it does next will determine whether Bengal’s mandate becomes a turning point or merely an interlude.

Every society carries within it a set of assumptions about crime and punishment; assumptions so deeply embedded that they feel like common sense rather than ideology. In Bengal, that embedded assumption has been what evolutionary thinker Gad Saad might call “suicidal empathy”: the systematic prioritisation of empathy for the perpetrator of crime over security for the innocent.

It sounds compassionate, but in practice, it is catastrophic.

When empathy becomes reflexive rather than reasoned, when it flows automatically towards........

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