Modi's BJP Takes West Bengal, Ends Long TMC Dominance

Narendra Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party turned West Bengal into its sharpest national breakthrough, winning 77 seats in 2021, up from just 3 in 2016, and becoming the state’s official opposition for the first time. Mamata Banerjee’s Trinamool Congress still held power with 215 seats in the 294-member assembly, but the scale of the BJP’s advance marked a decisive break in a state that had long resisted the party’s appeal.

The result redrew West Bengal’s political map. For the first time in the state’s history, the Indian National Congress and the Communist Party of India (Marxist) won no seats at all, a sign of how thoroughly the old opposition order had collapsed. By the 2017 Kanthi South by-election period, the BJP had already overtaken the Left Front as West Bengal’s main challenger, and defections helped accelerate that climb.

The election itself unfolded in extraordinary conditions. Voting was spread across eight phases from March 27 to April 29, 2021, with two constituencies voting later on September 30. It took place during India’s devastating second wave of COVID-19, when critics accused Modi and his allies of pressing ahead with campaigning while the public-health emergency deepened. Banerjee won a third consecutive term as chief minister, remaining India’s only female chief minister at the time, and her victory was widely read as both a personal endorsement and a protest against the central government’s handling of the crisis.

That is what made West Bengal such a symbolic target for the BJP. A win there would not just expand the party’s seat count, it would show that Modi’s national reach could break into one of India’s most enduring regional strongholds. State elections in India can shift the balance of power nationally, and this one drew more than 154 million voters across the country, making the outcome far more than a local contest.

The political stakes rose again after counting, when defeated opponents accused the BJP of cheating. In a race that already tested the party’s ability to move beyond its traditional bases, the allegations became part of a wider question about democratic legitimacy. West Bengal did not simply deliver another regional upset. It showed how far Modi’s party had come, and how fragile the opposition’s remaining strongholds had become.