West Bengal Assembly Elections 2026 | Suvendu Adhikari: From Nandigram to Nabanna, the organiser who unseated his mentor

Kolkata: “My people, particularly the elders, keep watch on me. They observe if my hairstyle or the pattern of my moustache has changed, or if I have started wearing chains or watches, changed the brand or colour of my car, or even my cottonwear,” Suvendu Adhikari said after a recent election rally in Nandigram. “They get reassured when they see I haven’t changed at all in the last two decades.”

The comment carries a political message for his constituency — of consistency, rootedness, and staying committed to his people despite the change in his political affiliation and the rise in his stature.

He now stands poised to succeed his former mentor, Mamata Banerjee, at the helm of the West Bengal government, as the Bharatiya Janata Party, which he joined after quitting the Trinamool Congress in December 2020, had a landslide victory in the assembly elections in the state on Monday.

Track LIVE updates from the West Bengal Assembly Election results here

The BJP did not formally project a chief ministerial face in West Bengal, but its top leadership offered enough signals during the campaign to indicate that Suvendu, who not only won Nandigram but also beat Mamata Banerjee in her home turf Bhabanipur, was the most likely choice to lead the government.

“There is a Hindu consolidation in favour of the BJP this time, apart from an anti-incumbency wave against the TMC,” a visibly elated Suvendu, who transformed himself into a firebrand saffron leader over the past five years, said, as his party routed Mamata’s. “The Hindu EVMs giving results for the BJP and the Muslim EVMs for the TMC,” added the 56-year-old, who had once ended most of his political speeches with both “Jai Hind and Khuda Hafiz”.

Suvendu’s rise acquired statewide visibility when he helped Mamata organise the agitation in Nandigram in 2006-07 against the Left Front government’s move to acquire farmland for a proposed chemical hub — a movement that reshaped West Bengal’s politics and paved the way for the Trinamool Congress’s ascent to power in 2011.

The agitation also marked his transformation from a district-level organiser into a state-level political player.

He did not have to begin from scratch. His father, Sisir Adhikari, had spent decades building a strong political network in Purba Medinipur — from his early years in the gram panchayet in the 1960s to serving as chairman of Contai Municipality from 1971 to 2009, and later as a legislator, Member of Parliament and Union Minister. Months after Suvendu, Sisir, too, joined the BJP in 2021, along with his other sons, Dibyendu and Soumendu, who also served as public representatives.

Suvendu himself was a councillor in Contai in the 1990s. He lost the assembly election in 2001 but won in 2006. In 2009, he moved to the Lok Sabha from Tamluk, defeating Lakshman Seth of the Communist Party of India (Marxist), and retained the seat in 2014. In 2016, he returned to state politics, winning Nandigram and becoming a minister in Mamata’s government. He held key portfolios, including transport and irrigation, but remained more an organiser than an administrator.

He was indispensable during the TMC’s expansion phase. In Jangalmahal — spanning West Midnapore, Bankura and Purulia — he worked to consolidate the party’s presence in regions once marked by insurgency. In Congress bastions such as Murshidabad and Malda, he helped engineer a gradual political shift to the TMC through defections and local-level consolidation.

Within the TMC, he came to be seen as an all-terrain leader who could be sent anywhere to build and expand the party’s organisation. His politics was deliberately unvarnished: he spoke the dialects of the regions he operated in and maintained direct access to grassroots workers.

But as the role and stature of Mamata’s nephew Abhishek Banerjee grew within the TMC — particularly in organisational matters — Suvendu’s distance from the party’s core leadership became more visible. He began skipping key meetings and government programmes, while his public speeches increasingly hinted at dissatisfaction among grassroots workers and a disconnect between the leadership and the organisation.

What began as unease eventually hardened into a rupture. Suvendu withdrew from party activities, resigned from ministerial responsibilities, and in December 2020 crossed over to the BJP — a move that carried more than symbolic weight. He did not move alone. Several other leaders, whom he had nurtured over the years, also followed him to the saffron party. In the 2021 assembly elections, he defeated Mamata in Nandigram, although the BJP failed to unseat the TMC. It was the time when he started calling his former mentor Mamata Begum, taking a dig at her for allegedly endangering the Hindus with her policy of appeasing the Muslims.

It was a defining moment in his political career.

Suvendu has been the Leader of the Opposition in the state assembly since 2021, and, over the past five years, has emerged as the BJP’s most firebrand leader in West Bengal, wearing Hindutva on his sleeve.

“Jo Hamare Sath, Hum Unke Sath (we are with those who are with us). Stop saying Sabka Saath, Sabka Vikas (we are with all to ensure the welfare of all),” he said after the BJP had suffered a setback in the Lok Sabha elections in West Bengal in 2024. “I do seek the votes of the Muslims, but the fact is that they don’t vote for me”.

He has also been the most vocal critic of Mamata and her TMC government — not only on issues such as unemployment and corruption, but also over what he describes as her policy of appeasing Muslims. He has repeatedly said that the Special Intensive Revision of electoral rolls would remove illegal migrants from Myanmar and Bangladesh, whom he alleges the TMC helped settle in West Bengal as a vote bank, endangering national security and the Hindus.

In rallies across the state — including in Nandigram and Bhabanipur — he made not-so-subtle calls for Hindus to unite and vote for the BJP, often claiming that Muslims rallied behind the TMC. However, after polling, he said that some “Rashtrawadi Muslims (Nationalist Muslims)” had also voted for him and other BJP candidates.

Now, as he prepares to take over the state government, Adhikari enters a new, more complex phase in his political journey. The methods that defined his rise — patiently building organisation, expanding territorial control, and carefully cultivating an image of rooted consistency — will now be tested in governance, where the demands of administration often sit uneasily with the instincts of mobilisation.

Whether that continuity holds in office will now play out in public view, even as back in Nandigram, his people will keep watch, looking for the same signs – the unchanged style and the familiar bearing – to be assured that power has not altered the man.