Of Bengal’s 294 Assembly seats, 49 have an electorate that is nearly 90 per cent Hindu — and the BJP swept all of them in this election. The scale of that sweep tells the story of the vote.
It was not always so. In the 2024 Lok Sabha polls, the BJP had led in only 20 of these 49 Assembly segments; the Trinamool Congress was ahead in 29. In 2021, when Mamata Banerjee returned to power for a third consecutive term, her party had won 27 of them. This time, not one remained.
The shift was sharpest in seats Trinamool had held for over a decade. Serampore and Chinsurah in Hooghly, and Keshiary in West Midnapore, had not gone to any other party since 2011. In Sabang, veteran minister Manas Bhunia — who had won seven consecutive terms — was beaten by the BJP in his own stronghold.
The 49 seats are spread across both north and south Bengal, from Alipurduar and Jalpaiguri in the north to Nadia, Hooghly, Jhargram, Purulia, Bankura and West Midnapore in the south. Together, they became the clearest measure of how decisively Hindu voters had moved.
“The outcome in those 49 constituencies was enough to gauge the level of Hindu consolidation in Bengal this time,” said a senior BJP leader. “That is why the party won many unexpected seats across the state — particularly in south Bengal — besides bagging 40 out of 54 seats in north Bengal.”
The BJP had built its campaign around a pointed narrative on infiltration, with Union home minister Amit Shah repeatedly targeting Mamata’s government for allegedly sheltering Rohingya and Bangladeshi immigrants for electoral gain.
When the special intensive revision (SIR) of electoral rolls was announced, the BJP projected it as a purge of illegal names. But BJP workers credit an earlier, more sustained effort: months of protests — backed by RSS affiliates and dozens of Hindu social and religious organisations — against the persecution of Hindus in Bangladesh following the ouster of Sheikh Hasina as Prime Minister in August 2024.
Door-to-door outreach by these groups, warning voters that Hindus were under threat under the Mamata government, is believed to have accelerated the consolidation well before polling day.
The result: 207 seats out of 293 (the election in one seat has been countermanded) — a figure that surprised even the BJP’s own leadership. Home minister Shah, who had boldly claimed 200-plus seats in 2021 before falling well short, was cautious this time, saying the party needed 170 to form a government. Suvendu Adhikari had put his estimate at 177.
Against this tide, Mamata’s own moves to court Hindu voters found no purchase. The centrepiece was Jagannath Dham in Digha — a ₹250-crore temple consecrated in April last year, built in the likeness of the Puri shrine, which drew over 1.33 crore visitors in its first year. She also laid foundation stones for Durga Angan in New Town and Mahakaal Mahatirtha in Siliguri.
Multiple sources said the gestures were a direct response to the BJP’s growing consolidation effort.
None of it worked. “People visited the temples, but did not vote for Mamata for building them,” said a BJP leader.
In victory, the party has been careful to step back from overt religious rhetoric. “There is nothing more about Hindus or Muslims. We are with the citizens of this state, irrespective of religion,” said Bengal BJP president Samik Bhattacharya — though he could not resist adding: “Lord Jagannath has finally thrown her corrupt rule into the Bay of Bengal.”
Political scientists, while acknowledging polarisation as a decisive factor, point to something else that made it electorally effective: a larger-than-usual turnout of Hindu voters, enabled by what they describe as comparatively robust polling arrangements by the Election Commission of India.
“Such consolidation helped the BJP cross the 200-seat mark, including surprising victories from TMC strongholds in Calcutta, because a much larger number of Hindu voters additionally came out and voted,” said political scientist Biswanath Chakraborty.