The Trinamul Congress remained silent about the BJP’s euphoric victory in the Delhi Assembly polls on Saturday.

Neither the Bengal chief minister Mamata Banerjee nor the Trinamul’s general secretary Abhishek Banerjee had said a word till late this afternoon.

Trinamul spokesperson Kunal Ghosh had a muted response to the Delhi poll results, where the party had deputed Lok Sabha MP Shatrughan Sinha to campaign for Aam Aadmi Party.

“2026 Bengal Assembly polls, AITC 250-plus seats, Mamata Banerjee fourth time chief minister. What happens elsewhere is not for us to think about. Delhi’s issues are in Delhi. It will have no impact here,” Ghosh wrote on his ‘X’ handle.

In Delhi, Arvind Kejriwal, and in Bengal, Mamata Banerjee mirrored Modi’s rise to national prominence more than a decade ago. Both even had held on to their citadels and stopped the Modi juggernaut on the tracks. In the state of Delhi, it was Kejriwal who won two terms and Mamata won in Bengal in successive Lok Sabha and Assembly polls.

Bengal’s turn comes next year and the saffron party has been trying hard to make inroads. And it made inroads earlier, but only in spasms, and could not sustain it since the 2019 Lok Sabha polls.

Like in Delhi this time, the Congress- the third force- came a cropper as the Congress-Left combine had in 2021 Assembly polls and the 2024 Lok Sabha polls with the votes going either the Trinamul way or the BJP. Trinamul has benefited the most from this arrangement.

But the defeat of Kejriwal will keep the poll battle-hardened Mamata thinking that the dole politics may not always do the trick.

For over a decade, BJP has been working at dismantling Kejriwal’s style of welfare politics, juxtaposing it with its relentless campaign on his alleged corruption. There were Enforcement Directorate investigations against AAP leaders and some of its prominent leaders even went to prison.

Also, the BJP had its own man as the Lt Governor of Delhi with whom Kejriwal and his leaders were constantly at loggerheads.

TMC Rajya Sabha MP Sagarika Ghose said Saturday that these may have played a role in the polls. She wrote on X: “Jailing most leaders, @LtGovDelhi blocking every move, bureaucrats refusing to listen to government orders--how was it even a semblance of a level playing field?”

One may find an uncanny similarity with Bengal where news of alleged scams, ministers in prison, has been common. And the acrimony between Mamata and the Raj Bhawan in Kolkata is not a state secret.

The AAP magic worked for ten long years with his politics-based on a mix of civic improvement and doles. Mamata has largely been banking on the many welfare schemes—panned out by critics as handouts—that she has rolled out since coming to power in 2011 from Imams to women ahead of the 2021 Assembly polls with “Lakshmir Bhandar” focussed on women.

In the Delhi Assembly polls, till the last count, the BJP had bagged 45.5 per cent of the votes, followed by AAP at 43.5 per cent. The Congress had improved its tally from 4.2 per cent in the 2020 Assembly polls to 6.3 per cent this time.

“The Delhi results prove that the regional parties on their own cannot defeat the BJP electorally. The Congress has its relevance. The regional parties have to rethink,” said Pradip Bhattacharya, former Congress Rajya Sabha MP.

But the situation may not be the same in Bengal, according to political analyst Subhamoy Maitra.

“AAP had served the purpose for the BJP by making the Congress completely redundant in Delhi. Plus, an opposition party ruling a state next to the national capital for a decade was irking it. The same compulsions are not at work in Bengal,” said Maitra to the Telegraph Online.

But the BJP shows enormous patience when it comes to dealing with its political opponents. It waited for over two decades to defeat Naveen Patnaik’s BJD. In Delhi, the BJP worked for over a decade to dismantle and dislodge the Aam Aadmi Party.

Mamata may have to look for a new set of beneficiaries or think of another strategy that does not depend on doles and government schemes. And indeed has reasons to worry about.