Prime Minister Narendra Modi of India’s right-wing populist and nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) has scored a massive victory in the West Bengal Legislative Assembly election.
While voting concluded on 29 April, the election results were not announced until all the votes were counted. Given that the state of West Bengal has a population of 106 million people, the counting took a while, and the results were revealed at last on Monday, 4 May.
BJP won 45.84 per cent of the popular vote and 207 seats, against the local All India Trinamool Congress (AITC) party’s 40.8 per cent of the popular vote and 80 seats.
This is a major victory for Prime Minister Modi. In their coverage, BBC.com describes it as ‘among the most significant breakthroughs of Modi’s 12-year reign’.
The opposition candidate Mamata Banerjee has been serving as the Chief Minister of West Bengal for 15 years, since May 2011. In the previous state election in 2021, her party won the popular vote in the state by ten points and took 215 seats.
PM Modi himself has been in office since 2014, when he was elected for the first time in a landslide, taking over for PM Manmohan Singh of the left-wing Indian National Congress (INC) party. Since then, PM Modi has been re-elected by massive margins in 2019 and 2024, running against INC candidates as his primary challengers both times.
In the state of West Bengal, however, his BJP party lost all three of those general elections. This is in part due to the large Muslim minority in the state, which makes up about 27 per cent of the local population. BJP very much focuses on Hindu values and Hindu nationalism in their political messaging, often pitting them against the Muslim minority in India.
Three other Indian states announced the results of their local legislative elections on 4 May.
In Kerala, the last remaining communist-led state government was voted out, as the Left Democratic Front (LDF) was defeated by the INC-backed United Democratic Front (UDF).
PM Modi’s BJP scored another victory in the state of Assam. Meanwhile, in Tamil Nadu, actor-turned-politician C Joseph Vijay won the Chief Ministership with his new Tamilaga Vettri Kazhagam (TVK) party.
The union territory of Puducherry also held a local legislative assembly election at the same time. There, the National Democratic Alliance’s (NDA) Natesan Rangaswamy emerged victorious. NDA is a multi-party alliance led by the Bharatiya Janata Party; therefore, this can also be considered a win for PM Modi.
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