West Bengal polls: The Bangladesh factor

What explains the tectonic shift in West Bengal, something tantamount to a colour revolution from Red to Green to now Saffron? Indian political pundits have come up with a range of explanations for how Mamata Banerjee's Trinamool Congress – which projected itself as "more Left than the Left" as she demolished 34 years of Communist rule in 2011 – could go down so tamely to the BJP.

Former top bureaucrat and Rajya Sabha MP Jawahar Sarkar blamed it on the “electoral genocide” - referring to the huge disenfranchisement of nearly 9 million voters in the rundown to the two-phase West Bengal Polls in late April. Of those dropped, many were dead or had shifted out of West Bengal and quite a few could genuinely be illegal migrants from Bangladesh, but nearly half the number were genuine voters, especially the nearly 3 million who have appealed for restoration of their voting rights. Top psephologists Yogendra Yadav and Pronoy Roy have called it a “stolen election” or even “a surgical strike on India's constitutional democracy”. The deletion of 20,000 to even 50,000 voters in most assembly constituencies cost the Trinamool very badly, Yadav and Roy argued. Trinamool leaders agreed.

BJP leaders say that 15 years of “complete misrule finally caught with Mamata Banerjee” and Bengalis voted for change. The normal anti-incumbency was surely on display on issues of corruption, nepotism, and poor management of law and order, they argue. Top editor and BJP's Rajya Sabha MP Swapan Dasgupta, who won from a prestigious Kolkata seat, argued that Bengalis were "fed up with the systematic undermining of all values Bengalis held dear" and that explained the wave against Trinamool. Psephologist Amitava Tiwari, who correctly predicted the election by asserting before the results that BJP was headed for a clear win and would form government, says Mamata's "excessive Muslim appeasement" helped BJP's politics of Hindu consolidation. He and Dasgupta pointed to "a feeling of an existential crisis amongst Bengali and non-Bengali Hindus all over West Bengal". That explained the huge turnout and Hindus voting against Mamata with a vengeance not seen in any election since her 2011 victory that ended 34 years of long Left rule.

I would argue that recent events in Bangladesh played a major role and helped the BJP achieve a degree of Hindu consolidation that proved to be Mamata’s undoing.

Prime Minister Narendra Modi and Home Minister Amit Shah had upped the ante by blaming Trinamool Congress for “vote bank politics” based on “Ghuspetiyas” (Infiltrators) and asked voters to bring the BJP to power to secure the border and stop infiltration. BJP's lead campaigner and Assam chief Minister Himanta Biswa Sarma, while addressing rallies in Bengal, has promised systematic pushback of infiltrators by making " life difficult for them here." More aggressive BJP campaigners have even said Mamata Banerjee's time as West Bengal chief minister was up and "she might now try become minister of Western Bangladesh." These campaigners also derisively refer to her as "Mumtaz Begum”, in an attempt to play up Trinamool's alleged Muslim appeasement --something that aligns with the “anti-infiltration” rhetoric.

The Trinamool's riposte was along the expected lines -- Mamata Banerjee dismissed the charges as the "usual Hindutva communal politics which has no place in Bengal", while nephew and party General Secretary Abhishek Banerjee reminded Home Minister Amit Shah that guarding the international border is the "Centre's responsibility" and the Border Security Force is under Shah's Home Ministry. To this, Shah hit back by raising the problems of land acquisition for setting up border outposts in West Bengal, deflecting the blame on the state government.

Himanta Biswa Sarma loudly proclaimed that his party was not even interested in the “Bangladeshi infiltrator vote”—back in Assam, he berates the Muslims of Bengali origin as “Miyas”. Sarma kept insisting that if Hindu consolidation worked in Assam and brought the BJP to power in two successive polls, it would work both in Assam and Bengal this time. And perhaps it did work the way he had anticipated.

Muslims constitute 27 percent of the Bengal electorate and 34 percent of the electorate in Assam. The Trinamool could only retain power if the Muslims wholly backed Mamata Banerjee and the Bengal chief minister could retain at least half the total Hindu vote, so far largely focused on women and the rural poor.

This writer has been witness to West Bengal elections, first as a university student and then as a journalist, since 1978 when the Left Front swept to power and ruled the state for 34 years. This has been followed by 15 years of Trinamool rule. Both the CPM-dominated Left and the Trinamool Congress, despite their national pretensions, have largely been region-driven parties, tapping into the Bengali linguistic-cultural identity and thus averse to the politics of religious polarisation.

“This atmosphere around this election reminds me of the supercharged atmosphere during the Partition. Never in post-independence West Bengal has demonstrative religiosity dominated an election as this one,” says Sukharanjan Dasgupta, veteran political commentator and author on state politics.

“Bangladesh has become the BJP’s favourite whipping boy because the Saffrons want to play on Hindu fears about rising Islamic radicalism in our neighbouring country,” said Dasgupta, also the author of a book on Bangladesh.

Impact of Hasina’s ouster

The ouster of the Bengali nationalist Sheikh Hasina government in Bangladesh and the phenomenal rise of Islamist radical forces in that country during the Muhammad Yunus-led interim government has made a substantial impact on the popular psyche in West Bengal. With atrocities against Hindus and non-Muslim minorities, especially rape of women, and mounting attacks on Sufi shrines widely reported from Bangladesh, and even a large number of liberals and Awami Leaguers fleeing into West Bengal since August 2024, the BJP’s anti-infiltrator tirade began to gain traction, amplified by social media. Protests over the arrest and continued detention of ISKCON monk Chinmoy Krishna Das in Bangladesh erupted in Kolkata and demonstrations occurred before the Bangladesh deputy high commission in the city.

Under the direct patronage of the Yunus-led interim government, the pro-Pakistan Jamaat-e-Islami, which had been banned days before Hasina’s fall, took centre stage in Bangladesh politics along with the newly formed National Citizens Party (NCP) led by the youth leaders of the anti-Hasina protests. The NCP aligned with the Jamaat-e-Islami, whose leaders promise an Islamic theocratic state in Bangladesh, raising fears of minority marginalisation.

Jamaat’s Border Victories

In the February 2026 parliamentary elections in Bangladesh, the Jamaat-e-Islami made phenomenal gains. With the Yunus government banning the Awami League, the Bangladesh Nationalist Party (BNP) swept the polls, winning 213 seats in a 300-member Jatiyo Sangsad (parliament).

But the Jamaat-e-Islami, which had never won more than 18 seats in parliamentary polls in an independent Bangladesh, ended up winning 68 seats. Its allies, including the NCP, won nine more. Since the BNP and the Jamaat-e-Islami have been allies against the Awami League since the 1990s, Bangladesh media have often speculated on the possibility of a national consensus government with Nobel laureate Yunus as president, BNP’s Tarique Rahman as prime minister and Jamaat chief Shafiqur Rahman as deputy prime minister. The BNP’s lack of administrative resistance to Jamaat-enforced Taliban-type moral policing against women and attacks on liberal institutions linked to the legacy of the 1971 Liberation War raises the spectre of a dangerous slide towards Islamist radicalism that started during the Yunus regime.

Of the 68 seats won by the Jamaat-e-Islami in the February polls, 51 are located in the districts bordering India. All but a few of them are on the borders of West Bengal in Bangladesh’s western districts like Rangpur, Rajshahi, Gaibandha and Satkhira.

BJP’s Border Gains

As many as 44 constituencies in West Bengal’s 294-member state assembly are located on the border with Bangladesh. Spread across districts including Cooch Behar, Jalpaiguri, Uttar Dinajpur, Dakshin Dinajpur, Darjeeling, Malda, Murshidabad, Nadia, North 24 Parganas, and South 24 Parganas, these constituencies often influenced electoral outcomes in Bangladesh. Because another 50-odd seats alongside these 44 are not far from the Bangladesh border and are directly prone to be influenced by developments across a live frontier. In the 2021 assembly elections, the Trinamool Congress won 27 of these 44 seats, especially those with a significant Muslim population. But the BJP made significant gains, winning 17 of these 44 seats, especially by virtue of their strong performance in constituencies with a high presence of Matua Hindus, mostly migrants from Bangladesh. Matua voters are also a decisive factor in about 40 seats. In the 2026 elections, the BJP swept these 100-odd seats and that paved the way for a resounding BJP victory.

Since the communal riots in April 2025 in Murshidabad district, the BJP has intensified its attacks against the Trinamool Congress, accusing them of “Muslim appeasement” and being "soft on infiltration". Due to rising Islamist radicalism, especially reflected in sweeping Jamaat victories in districts along the West Bengal border, the BJP campaign gained much more electoral traction than ever before. Even in Muslim-dominant districts like Malda and Murshidabad, where voter deletion in SIR has been the heaviest, the Bangladesh factor led to Hindu vote consolidation as never before and led to several upsets.

Jyoti Basu’s Prophecy

Nobody understood this "two Bengal" communal spillover better than the late Jyoti Basu. With his roots in East Bengal, Basu was surely nostalgic, but pragmatism shaped his approach to Bangladesh.

When he took the lead in India signing a 30-year treaty on Ganges water-sharing in 1996 and then played a key role in the Indian push to end the tribal insurgency in Bangladesh’s Chattogram Hill Tracts a year later, I asked Basu why he was so keen to help the then newly installed Sheikh Hasina government in Bangladesh.

In his characteristic cryptic response in Bengali with some hand signs played in, Basu said: “Okhane Ora Ese Gele, Ekhane Eder Atkano Muskil Hobe.” Meaning if Hasina loses out, the Islamists will take over Bangladesh and we will have trouble keeping out the Hindutva brigade here in West Bengal. He didn’t name anyone, first said “ora” (they), pointing to the chin meaning the beard, then said “eder” (pointing to the forehead used for the tilak).

Basu’s worst fears have now appeared to come true.

Subir Bhaumik is a former BBC and Reuters correspondent in Eastern India and an author on Northeast India and Bangladesh. He has worked at bdnews24.com as a senior editor after his long BBC career and also in Myanmar’s Mizzima Media. He is a former Oxford fellow.