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Kolkata/New Delhi: Suvendu Adhikari’s rise to the chief ministership of West Bengal is not the story of a clean political outsider sweeping away a corrupt old order. Adhikari is a hard-edged insider who mastered Bengal’s violent, factional, patronage-driven politics, switched camps at a decisive moment, and then repackaged himself as the Bharatiya Janata Party’s most aggressive Hindutva face in the state.

On May 9, 2026, Adhikari took oath as West Bengal’s first BJP chief minister, after the BJP won 207 seats in the assembly election and ended Mamata Banerjee’s 15-year rule. His victory over Banerjee completed a remarkable personal arc. The Election Commission result page for Bhabanipur showed Adhikari defeating his once political guru by 73,917 votes to 58,812, a margin of 15,105 votes.

But the victory also brings to Writers’ Building a figure whose career is inseparable from controversy. Yet the symbolism of that victory should not obscure the nature of the man now in power. Adhikari’s career has been shaped by organisational brilliance, opportunism, controversy, allegations of corruption, communal polarisation and a striking comfort with confrontation. He is no accidental chief minister but the product of Bengal’s hardest forms of power politics.

A dynasty in Purba Medinipur

Adhikari’s roots lie in his family’s long dominance over Purba Medinipur. The family’s influence over the Kanthi and Tamluk belts gave him a readymade political infrastructure. His father Sisir Adhikari was an old-guard Congress leader whose long municipal and parliamentary career created a network of local patronage, cooperative influence and administrative access that helped his son, Suvendu, enter politics as an heir to a functioning regional machine. 

That inheritance, however, does not fully explain his rise. Adhikari’s political brand was born in Nandigram. In 2007, when the Left Front government’s land-acquisition push triggered a mass uprising, he emerged as one of the principal ground organisers of the anti-acquisition movement. That movement helped Mamata Banerjee dismantle the Left’s 34-year rule, but it also gave Adhikari a separate political legitimacy. No longer just Sisir’s son, he was now a tactical man in the field, mobilising village networks, coordinating resistance and helping turn agrarian anger into an anti-Left political force.

Nandigram and the politics of force

But Nandigram also supplied the first dark layer of his public persona. The same movement that made him a mass leader also associated him with a politics of force. West Bengal CID had claimed in 2010 that Adhikari supplied arms and ammunition to Maoists during the Nandigram violence. These remain allegations,........

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