The Trinamool Congress on Friday swatted away speculation on any impact of the Bihar Assembly election result on the Bengal polls next summer, asserting that Mamata Banerjee would become chief minister for a fourth consecutive term by handing out an electoral decimation to the saffron camp.

BJP leaders like Union textiles minister Giriraj Singh and the leader of the Opposition in the Bengal Assembly, Suvendu Adhikari, went into chest-thumping mode, claiming a Bongo (Bengal) victory after Kolingo (Odisha) and Ongo (Bihar).

Trinamool deployed its senior spokespersons, such as party state general secretary Kunal Ghosh and state industry minister Shashi Panja, to counter the BJP leaders’ jubilant belligerence.

Ghosh, underscoring the Congress’s inability to counter the BJP, said Mamata was all set to retain power here.

“The Bihar equation has no connection with Bengal. It will not affect Bengal, where the factors are development, unity, harmony, rights, and self-respect. With 250-plus seats, Mamata Banerjee will become chief minister again,” he said.

In the 294-seat Bengal House, the majority mark is 148.

Ghosh added that the only impact of the Bihar verdict would be enhanced zeal of the BJP — allegedly in cahoots with the Election Commission of India — to conduct the “exclusionary, opaque” special intensive revision (SIR) of the electoral roll more aggressively in Bengal.

Sources in Trinamool said Mamata, who was likely to publicly react to the Bihar result before the week ends, was not losing sleep over it. They said she was very confident that the SIR would “gloriously backfire” on the BJP, infuriating even vast sections of Hindus who voted for them in recent elections, besides consolidating all other elector groups against the saffron camp.

They have said the issues in Bihar or Odisha have near-zero resonance in Bengal.

“Besides, the NDA won in Bihar largely because of welfare schemes and social security initiatives, especially the pro-women programmes. Everyone in India knows Mamata Banerjee has aced that game, having pioneered most of these measures over the past decade and a half...,” said a senior in the ruling dispensation.

“The NDA was in power there, trying to retain it, and could not have done so without Nitish Kumar. Here, the BJP is in the Opposition, with no Nitish-esque ally and no acceptable face of its own. She is in power here, with a sky-high likelihood of retaining it. No face can be compared to hers. From the support of women (one out of every two Bengal votes) to minorities (one out of every three Bengal votes), she has most key sections covered,” he added, asserting that Mamata already had a headstart of around 110 seats (out of the 120-odd minority-dominated constituencies) and the BJP had its task cut out, in trying to win 148 out of the remaining 170 or so.

“... If elections here were to take place tomorrow, the BJP would not cross 40 seats.”

State industry minister Panja said the BJP was a “toxic factory of venom”. She was responding to Union minister Singh’s incendiary remarks that the NDA would now remove “Rohingya-Bangladeshi infiltrators” from Bengal to ensure that the Trinamool chief could no longer win elections here.

“Giriraj Singh has dared to brand Bengal, a state that has given India its Constitution-makers, poets, revolutionaries, Nobel laureates, scientists, and social reformers, as a state of the Rohingya and Bangladeshis. This is a direct attack on Bengal’s identity, dignity, and civilisational pride,” said Panja.