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Kolkata: The Bharatiya Janata Party’s 2026 breakthrough in West Bengal was not simply an anti-incumbency wave. Coupled with the effects of the special intensive revision, it was also the political conversion of a long cycle of communal flashpoints. Electoral narratives of insecurity and around the bogey of “appeasement” under the Trinamool Congress arose in the same spaces and made their way to the ballots. 

The data is significant. BJP rose from 77 seats in 2021 to 207 seats in 2026, gaining 130 seats, while TMC fell from 214 seats to 80, losing 134 seats. Even more tellingly, 129 constituencies shifted directly from TMC in 2021 to BJP in 2026, showing that BJP not only retained old strongholds, but was the beneficiary of a mass transfer of TMC territory to itself.

The pattern lends statistical weight to the fact that the BJP often succeeds in converting communal tension into electoral advantage by framing itself as the protector of Hindu security, identity, and law and order.

A violence cycle that changed the electoral frame

For decades, Bengal’s violence was primarily understood as political – party offices destroyed, local strongmen targeted, cadre clashes, panchayat-level skirmishes and election-time intimidation. The post-2011 period witnessed a structural shift in which political competition increasingly used religious processions, social-media triggers, festival-time disputes and post-election reprisals as flashpoints. 

This shift mattered in 2026 because BJP did not have to prove that every riot or clash was caused by TMC. It only had to persuade voters that such incidents had become frequent under TMC rule, and that the state government had either failed to prevent them or had handled them selectively. That argument allowed BJP to shift the campaign terrain from welfare delivery, where TMC had long been strong, to security, religious identity and resentment.

The scale of this violence cycle was visible early in the third term of the Mamata Banerjee government. According to a Right to Information request filed by activist Biswanath Goswami, in just 18 months between January 2021 and June 2022, at least 65 communal-violence cases were registered across West Bengal – 30 in 2021 and another 35 in the first half of 2022.

Between 2021 and 2026, incidents in  Mominpur-Ekbalpur, Shibpur and Rishra, Garden Reach, Beldanga, Jangipur, Raghunathganj-Jangipur , and Mothabari all became a part of a broader BJP claim that Bengal’s social order was breaking down under TMC.

Bangladesh and the ‘Hindu khatre mein hain‘ narrative

Instability in Bangladesh after 2024, along with widely circulated reports of attacks on Hindu people have bolstered the BJP’s “Hindu khatre mein hain (Hindus are in danger)” narrative in Bengal. Party leaders framed communal violence in West Bengal as part of a wider regional threat to Hindus, arguing to peddle the bogey that the TMC’s alleged “minority appeasement” could push Bengal towards a Bangladesh-like situation. This cross-border anxiety was especially effective in border and refugee-heavy districts such as North 24 Parganas, Nadia, Malda, Murshidabad and parts of South Bengal, where memories of........

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