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New Delhi: Conducted under the shadow of the contentious special intensive revision (SIR) of the electoral rolls, the 2026 assembly elections has seen the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) trounce the Mamata Banerjee-led Trinamool Congress in West Bengal, storming the opposition citadel that had been out of its reach despite it forming three successive governments at the Union level.

The victory in West Bengal on Monday (May 4) has cemented the BJP’s consolidation in the east, with the saffron party also securing a record third successive term in neighbouring Assam.

While the party now effectively has India’s north, west and east under its control, it has once again failed to make effective gains in the south, with both Tamil Nadu and Kerala opting for change in government but remaining out of the BJP’s reach.

The elections have also seen the ousting of two strong regional leaders. Along with Banerjee, the BJP’s other staunch regional opponent, M.K. Stalin, has been voted out of power, with actor-politician Vijay’s Tamilaga Vettri Kazhagam (TVK) emerging as the frontrunner in Tamil Nadu, and the saffron party’s ally in the All India Anna Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam (AIADMK) relegated to the third spot.

In Kerala, the Congress-led United Democratic Front (UDF) has staged a comeback, with the state returning to its template of alternating between the two fronts, which has been its mainstay for decades, albeit with 2021 being an outlier when Pinarayi Vijayan’s Communist Party of India (Marxist) (CPI(M))-led Left Democratic Front returned to power for a record second consecutive time.

Prime Minister Narendra Modi in his victory speech to BJP workers at the party headquarters on Monday evening said that the lotus now blooms from “Gangotri to Ganga Sagar” and focused on how the saffron party has for the first time won the mandate in West Bengal – but the party’s inability to make inroads in the south were largely glossed over.

This has once again drawn attention to the BJP’s failure to consolidate in the south, despite effective gains in the rest of the country.

SIR, anti-incumbency, communalism cocktail to breach Bengal

In West Bengal, the Election Commission (EC)’s website on Monday night showed that the BJP had won 206 seats, rising from 77 in 2021. The Trinamool Congress (TMC) on the other hand, which had won 213 seats in 2021, was reduced to winning in 80 seats and leading in one seat.

In terms of vote share, the 2026 results show the BJP with 45.85% against 38.1% in 2021. The TMC’s vote share on the other hand dropped to 40.8% in comparison to  47.9% in 2021.

West Bengal had remained the BJP’s long-desired state, where it has worked over the last decade to emerge as the principal opposition, edging out the Left and the Congress despite 15 years of uninterrupted TMC rule.

The 2026 election saw the BJP riding on the twin........

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