You need a compelling story to turn an essentially Red state into a saffron one, almost a colour revolution of sorts through the ballot box. The Left Front may have lost power to Mamata Banerjee’s Trinamool Congress in 2011 after 34 long years, but West Bengal even under Banerjee remained largely Left.
In fact, the politics of the Trinamool Congress, with its vehement nod to wide-net welfarism and its history of being on the wrong side of big industry (the Singur agitation of 2006-2008 against Tatas and the inability to attract substantial volume of new business when in power) was commonly spoken of in the state as being Left of Left.
This explains why the result of the Assembly polls on 4 May has come as such a shock to many Bengal watchers. Among other factors, a big reason for the BJP’s decisive win is neighbouring Bangladesh.
Be it the treatment meted out to Bangladeshi Hindus after the fall of the Sheikh Hasina administration, or the consolidated voting of the Matua community that has its origin story in modern-day Bangladesh or the fear of illegal Bangladeshi immigrants changing the demography of the state.
Hasina’s fall, Hindutva’s rise
In December 2025, a huge protest led by Hindu monks and Hindutva groups took place outside the Bangladesh Deputy High Commission in Kolkata, demanding justice for Dipu Chandra Das, a Hindu garment worker who was lynched and set on fire by a mob in the neighbouring country earlier in the month. Das’ murder was an isolated incident. Attacks on Hindus in Bangladesh had made global news and raised political temperatures in West Bengal.
After the news of Das’ murder spread, protesters attempted to break through barricades, triggering heated arguments, scuffles, and then physical clashes with the police outside the Bangladesh Deputy High Commission in Kolkata.
To members of the press that had assembled at the spot, protesters levelled sharp allegations against the police. “Some were heard shouting, ‘These police are not state police, these police are Bangladeshi police. These police beat the monks with sticks and tore the clothes of protesting women’,” a news report said.
For Aroon Shah, state vice-president of the Bharatiya Janata Yuva Morcha, the BJP’s youth wing, the irony couldn’t have been sharper. “Imagine monks in saffron clothes being thrashed in public in the heart of Kolkata for protesting against the killing of Dipu Chandra Das simply for being Hindu. On whose side was Mamata Banerjee? Neither on the side of the Bangladeshi Hindu nor was she for the Hindu from West Bengal,” Shah told ThePrint.
Leader of the Opposition Suvendu Adhikari immediately met senior officials of the Bangladesh Deputy High Commission as part of a five-member delegation, and demanded an end to atrocities on Hindus in Bangladesh. He also launched a scathing attack on the Mamata Banerjee government over police action on Hindu protestors.
The incident helped Adhikari streamline his narrative that there are 1.25 crore illegal immigrants in the West Bengal voters’ list in no small part due to Banerjee’s blessings. “No one will be able to save the chief minister this time… The instances of false voting will reduce. Those who used to cast false votes will be weeded out,” he had said much before Dipu Chandra Das’s murder and the attack on Hindu protestors in Kolkata.
Much of the BJP narrative since then has been that while Hindus are vulnerable in Bangladesh after the fall of the Sheikh Hasina government on 5 August 2024, Muslims could illegally enter India through the porous border and fill up the electoral rolls giving a distinct electoral advantage to Banerjee.
A distinctly Left state that had for long mostly kept the Hindu-Muslim binary out of poll narrative could no longer do so.
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The Matua factor
Founded by Harichand Thakur in the 19th century in East Bengal (now Bangladesh), the Matuas are a politically significant Bengali Scheduled Caste community with influences in several key constituencies in West Bengal. While the BJP had relentlessly courted the Matuas, their high deletion rate under the SIR was believed to have turned this voting block against the saffron party.
It didn’t.
Ayan Guha, British Academy International Fellow at the Department of Anthropology, University of Sussex, told ThePrint that while it is a fact that a substantial section of the Matuas has suffered exclusion from electoral rolls due to SIR, it seems they have chosen to stay with the BJP this election. The reason, Guha believes, is Bangladesh.
“While this exclusion has created anxiety and frustration, it is quite evident that the BJP still remains their preferred choice. It clearly appears that widespread violence and atrocities committed on the Hindus in post-Hasina Bangladesh have made them vote as Hindu refugees,” Guha said.
Guha calls this the “politics of memory”. “The Bangladesh situation has given an impetus to the BJP’s ‘politics of memory’, which relies on invoking the memory of religious victimisation faced by the Matua-Namasudras in East Pakistan/Bangladesh for the purpose of mobilising them not a lower caste group but as a persecuted group of Hindu refugees,” he said.
Guha said he was surprised to know from some of his ground-level contacts in Matua-heavy constituencies that even people whose names or family members’ names got deleted in the SIR actively participated in the BJP’s election campaign with the hope that the party, due to its pro-Hindu orientation, would deliver on its promise of securing citizenship status and voting rights for them.
The Hindu-Muslim political binary has not worked in Bengal’s essentially pluralistic society as it has elsewhere. But the goings-on in neighbouring Bangladesh have given a bold new turn to Bengal’s politics and the BJP a shot at power.
Deep Halder is an author and a contributing editor at ThePrint. He tweets @deepscribble. Views are personal.
(Edited by Aamaan Alam Khan)