Poetry did not help Ms Mamata Banerjee rise above defeat: she is a very sore loser. Her call for president’s rule for West Bengal sounds a little forlorn now, coming from the solitary Trinamool Congress bastion she has defended in Calcutta South. Not only was she completely wrong in her expectations of the Bengal electorate, but she was also wrong about herself. Ms Banerjee was convinced that her own vote share would increase, even if by a single vote. She has won this time by 99,000 votes, rather short of the 2,14,000 difference last time. The sole winner from the Trinamool Congress — a party till recently considered to be the Left Front’s serious rival in the southern part of the state — needs some hard self-searching to work out what went wrong. For it is not just one thing. The most obvious, yet the most underestimated, reason, which emerges from the trend all over the country, is a death-dealing anti-Bharatiya Janata Party wave. From that point of view, the Trinamool Congress’s recent fate had been set on course the day Ms Banerjee decided to become the BJP’s ally. The current of feeling against the Communist Party of India (Marxist) allowed her to survive politically, in spite of her illogical histrionics and the indiscipline within her party. The assembly elections were a hard lesson, which was not taken. The way since has obviously been downhill. Miscalculations about candidates — the Sudip Bandopadhyay fiasco being the most notable — are part of this larger story. And this must be seen in the context of the even larger story, in which the two BJP members of parliament, both ministers, both lost to the CPI(M).

The Left Front has won back the seats it had lost earlier to the Trinamool Congress and has increased its vote share in some seats. Its renewed confidence is understandable, especially since its say is now so important in the context of national government formation. At the same time, the slow return of the Congress in a state that had seen it at its weakest, repeatedly called the “CPI(M)’s B-team” by Ms Banerjee, may be an early indication of a revival of its party organization. North Bengal is quite Congress-coloured, and so is Murshidabad. It is not just Mr Pranab Mukherjee’s first-time victory that is striking. The battle might have been more interesting had the Congress not fielded candidates like Ms Nafisa Ali and Ms Moushumi Chatterjee. The lack of a credible opposition has always been a boon for the CPI(M). But if the Congress begins to revive, that vacuum, left unfilled by the Trinamool Congress, may show signs of filling up.