A hundred days is too short to judge a government, but long enough to understand its instincts. By that measure, the BJP’s first months in power in West Bengal have revealed both the possibilities and the limits of regime change. The change in political atmosphere has been unmistakable. A party that spent decades on Bengal’s margins now governs with an authority that would once have been unimaginable. Institutions long identified with the Left-liberal political culture, most conspicuously Jadavpur University, have become arenas for an assertion of a new ideological confidence.

Chief Minister Suvendu Adhikari’s language of nationalism and his challenge to what he calls a culture of intimidation underline a larger ambition: not merely to replace the Trinamool Congress in office, but to alter Bengal’s political vocabulary. That transformation is easier to announce than to accomplish. Bengal’s political culture was not created by Mamata Banerjee alone, nor will it disappear with her electoral defeat. Attempts to impose a new ideological consensus risk producing unnecessary confrontation where a democratic government should........

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