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Opinion National Interest PoV 50-Word Edit

ThePrint On Camera Videos In Pictures

Society & Culture Around Town Book Excerpts Vigyapanti The Dating Story

More Judiciary Education YourTurn Work With Us Campus Voice

Mamata is a liberal heroine nationally. Ruled Bengal with corruption & thuggery

At some stage, Modi will have to decide what the BJP stands for. Does it only stand for governance in Delhi? And does it need to depend on religious polarisation in the states?

It’s been a good election season for Prime Minister Narendra Modi. Nobody can dismiss the BJP as a cow belt party after two stunning victories in Assam and West Bengal.

Of the two, Bengal is the one that really matters. For more than a decade, sensing that the CPI(M) and Congress were collapsing in West Bengal, Modi and Union Home Minister Amit Shah have been trying their best to win over Bengal and fill the vacuum. This time, after 15 years of Trinamool Congress (TMC) and its supremo Mamata Banerjee, the voters of West Bengal finally decided that it was time for a change and voted the BJP in.

You could see the BJP victory as a natural consequence of anti-incumbency, but almost everyone read much more into it. For the BJP, it was confirmation that the party now had a national character. For many in the TMC, it was a stolen victory, attributable to the SIR exercise, which led to the removal of many Trinamool voters from the rolls and various other forms of rigging. And for India’s so-called secular-liberal establishment, it was an utter disaster, the collapse of the last bastion of pluralism and liberal values.

All of these interpretations were rooted in fact, yet none of them was entirely accurate. Yes, the BJP’s popularity has spread much beyond the Hindi belt, but the ‘national’ party may be overstating the case. As the elections in Tamil Nadu and Kerala demonstrated, the BJP does not count for much in many Southern states.

The SIR exercise may well have been a cynical ploy by a partisan Election Commission to........

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