West Bengal Assembly Elections 2026 | New BJP CM to take oath at Brigade Parade Ground on Tagore's birth anniversary

Prime Minister Narendra Modi and Union Home Minister Amit Shah, as well as many of the chief ministers of other states ruled by the BJP, will attend the ceremony.

Kolkata: The new chief minister of West Bengal will take the oath at a public rally in Brigade Parade Ground in Kolkata on Saturday.

Prime Minister Narendra Modi and Union Home Minister Amit Shah, as well as many of the chief ministers of other states ruled by the Bharatiya Janata Party, will attend the ceremony, which will take place in the vicinity of the statue of Jana Sangh founder Syama Prasad Mukherjee and will mark the saffron party’s capture of political power in West Bengal for the first time.

The venue and the date the BJP chose to mark the change of regime in West Bengal are significant. The Brigade Parade Ground has been a witness to several political rallies in the state, including the one Mamata Banerjee, now outgoing chief minister, had held as a Youth Congress leader on November 25, 1992, when she had symbolically rung the death-knell of the then Left Front government – six years before quitting the grand old party and launching her own Trinamool Congress.

The chief minister of the new BJP government of West Bengal will take the oath on a day the state will celebrate the 165th birth anniversary of Gurudev Rabindranath Tagore. The choice of the date appears to be a move reflecting the saffron party’s continuing bid to embed itself in the cultural fabric of the state.

The BJP had a landslide victory in the just-concluded assembly elections in the state, ending the 15-year-long rule of the TMC, which, led by Mamata Banerjee, had taken over the state government in 2011.

The newly elected 207 legislators of the Bharatiya Janata Party will hold a meeting in Kolkata on Friday and elect the legislative party’s leader, who would take over as the chief minister of the new government, Samik Bhattacharya, the party’s state unit chief, told journalists. He said that the new chief minister would take oath at 10 a.m. on Saturday.

Bhattacharya himself is also a frontrunner for the office of the chief minister, along with Suvendu Adhikari, who emerged as the most prominent face of the BJP in West Bengal since joining the party after quitting the Trinamool Congress in December 2020.

Shah and Odisha Chief Minister Mohan Charan Majhi will attend the meeting of the newly elected legislators as the observer and co-observer on behalf of the BJP’s high command.

The other contenders for the office of the chief minister included the party veterans like Dilip Ghosh, Sukanta Majumdar, Anandamay Barman and Swapan Dasgupta. The new government may have a deputy chief minister or two, according to the BJP sources.

Mamata stuck to her decision not to resign from the office of the chief minister even as the state’s Chief Electoral Officer Manoj Agarwal met the state’s governor R N Ravi and submitted the notification regarding the constitution of the new legislative assembly. The term of the current legislative assembly would conclude on Thursday.

Had Mamata resigned, Ravi would have asked her to continue as the caretaker chief minister till her successor was sworn in. But, in view of her refusal to step down, the governor might dismiss her government after the end of the term of the state assembly and recommend imposition of the President’s Rule for a day till the new chief minister took oath.

Mamata on Wednesday said that she would not resign from the office of West Bengal chief minister, as the BJP’s victory was the result of a conspiracy by the saffron party and the Election Commission, but not a mandate of the people. The TMC supremo had a meeting with her party’s 80 newly elected legislators at her residence on Wednesday. She told them that she would not resign and would rather be sacked from the office of the chief minister by the governor. She reiterated her allegation that the BJP had ‘looted’ at least 100 seats from the TMC with the help of the EC.