Anatomy of a landslide

The Bharatiya Janata Party secured little more than 29 million votes (45.85%) in West Bengal, while the Trinamool Congress received slightly less than 26 million (40.80%). The difference between the two principal rivals is just over 3.2 million votes, or roughly five percentage points. Yet that relatively modest lead translated into a seat advantage of 127 (BJP 207, TMC 80).

West Bengal’s election demonstrated once again that electoral politics is rarely governed by linear arithmetic. A reasonable swing in vote share, when combined with social consolidation and Opposition fragmentation, can produce disproportionately large shifts in political power against the backdrop of the Special Intensive Revision of the electoral rolls.

The BJP has not merely emerged as the single largest party; it has secured a victory of historic proportions, breaching the two-thirds majority mark that has repeatedly defined regime changes in the state since 1972. The TMC, despite being in power for 15 years and having a formidable organisational structure, has lost the state for the first time since 2011.

Many observers now claim that the outcome was obvious all along. Such retrospective certainty is one of the recurring rituals of electoral politics. Once results are declared, ambiguity suddenly disappears from public memory. Yet caution before the election was not irrational.

Several exit polls projected a narrow BJP majority, while others suggested that the Trinamool Congress might still retain power. The unusually large-scale revision of electoral rolls also introduced uncertainty into any straightforward comparison with previous elections.

In the 2024 parliamentary election, West Bengal had roughly 76 million voters on the rolls, with around 60.5 million votes cast. This time, after deletions and revisions, the electorate shrank to nearly 68.25 million. Yet total votes cast increased to around 63.5 million, with turnout crossing 92%. In other words, the denominator decreased sharply while the numerator increased significantly. Nearly 3 million additional votes were cast despite a much smaller electorate.

The BJP successfully converted heightened participation into a regime-changing wave. The consolidation of Hindu votes behind the BJP appears significantly sharper than in previous elections. The issue must also be approached through some elementary arithmetic, because competitive religiosity emerged as one of the election’s most important variables.

To arrive at a rough statistical understanding, let us begin with a few simplifying assumptions. First, assume that the BJP receives virtually no minority votes. The standard disclaimer applies: this is obviously not entirely true, but it simplifies the arithmetic.

Second, let us assume that the electorate consists of roughly 70% Hindu voters and 30% minorities. This too remains an estimate, given that India has not conducted a full Census since 2011. 

If we divide the BJP’s vote share by 0.7 (the denominator is translated to only Hindu electors, considered around 70% of the total votes polled), we obtain a rough estimate of Hindu vote consolidation behind the party.

The figures are revealing: approximately 54.5% in the 2021 Assembly election, nearly 58% in the 2024 parliamentary election, and around 65.5%
in the just-concluded Assembly election. The direction of the trend is unmistakable. Hindu consolidation behind the BJP has not merely increased; the rate of increase has itself accelerated.

Between 2021 and 2024, the estimated rise was around 3.5 percentage points. In the following two years, that increase appears to have crossed 7.5 percentage points. That acceleration may well explain the scale of the Trinamool Congress’s defeat.

A counterargument will naturally arise: sections of Hindu voters continued supporting other parties as well. That is undoubtedly true. Yet even after accounting for such corrections, the broader political conclusion remains difficult to avoid: the BJP succeeded in transforming a substantial part of West Bengal’s Hindu electorate into a far more consolidated political bloc than at any previous point in the state’s electoral history.

Yet the equally important development was on the other side of the electoral spectrum: minority votes did not consolidate behind the Trinamool Congress in the manner many observers anticipated.

A very small but politically significant section may even have shifted directly toward the BJP. More importantly, the fragmentation of minority votes among the Trinamool Congress, Left Front–ISF alliance, Congress, and smaller regional forces indirectly strengthened the BJP in several minority-dominated constituencies.

For example, Karandighi offers one striking example of this phenomenon. In a constituency with a substantial minority electorate, the BJP (96,260 votes) secured victory without obtaining a majority of the total votes polled.

The combined votes of the TMC (76,391) and the CPI(M) (39,414) exceeded the BJP’s tally, but the division of minority votes between the two Opposition formations enabled the BJP candidate to win. The constituency, therefore, illustrates how consolidation on one side and fragmentation on the other can produce sharply asymmetric electoral outcomes. This is precisely where electoral arithmetic turns non-linear.

Initial analyses show that in 82 seats, the votes secured by the third candidate exceeded the victory margin between the winner and the runner-up.

Regional patterns also reveal how unevenly this political shift unfolded. In North Bengal, particularly in Cooch Behar, Alipurduar, and Jalpaiguri, the BJP appears to have converted its earlier parliamentary gains into a stable Assembly-level consolidation.

Border politics, citizenship narratives, and consolidation among Hindu communities combined into a durable electoral bloc. In the industrial and semi-urban belts of southern Bengal, corruption fatigue and perceptions of political criminalisation appear to have played a major role in shifting sections of lower-middle-class and urban Bengali Hindu voters towards the BJP.

The performance of the Left Front, ISF, Congress, and smaller regional parties underscores another reality of West Bengal politics: dissatisfaction alone does not automatically create a viable third force. The CPI(M)’s vote share remains below 4.5% (1 seat), while the Left Front as a whole has only marginally crossed the 5% mark. Adding the ISF’s (1 seat) roughly 1.5% takes that to around 6.5%.

The Congress secured close to 3% votes and two seats. Taken together, the broader third space in West Bengal politics still commands support from roughly 10% of the electorate — approximately six million voters. That number is politically too significant to be dismissed, even if it remains insufficient at present to emerge as an independent pole of power.

Finally, with the swearing-in of Suvendu Adhikari as chief minister on Saturday, west Bengal’s politics has entered a new phase. Whether this marks a durable ideological realignment or merely a powerful anti-incumbency correction remains uncertain. However, one conclusion is unavoidable: in modern Indian elections, numbers matter less in isolation than in distribution.

(The writer, a professor at Indian Statistical Institute in Kolkata, is an independent analyst, studying different aspects of West Bengal politics)

Disclaimer: The views expressed above are the author's own. They do not necessarily reflect the views of DH.