The election results from West Bengal, Tamil Nadu, Kerala, Assam and Puducherry, on the surface, are a boost for the BJP and its style of electioneering — brash, in-your-face, communal, and, to top it, broadly free of restrictions that would apply to other parties under the Election Commission’s model code of conduct.

If Assam is seen as a predictable BJP victory and Tamil Nadu as a favourable BJP result in that a strong anti-BJP voice in the leadership of M.K. Stalin’s DMK has been reined in, then West Bengal is the prize that would make the BJP stand out and the Opposition cry foul. The state that has resisted the saffron advance for decades finally makes way for the BJP in a bitterly contested election against the incumbent chief minister Mamata Banerjee and her Trinamool Congress (TMC), but this is a result not without its concerns, complexities and worries.

This is the first time that the BJP will take power in West Bengal, which has not had a national party leading the state since Siddhartha Shankar Ray of the Congress left office as chief minister on 30 April 1977. This clearly represents a tectonic shift in the landscape of Bengal politics and will have its impact across the nation. The state that was led by the Communist Party of India (Marxist) for over 23 years and by the TMC for 15 years now goes to the BJP.

But the West Bengal result raises important questions about the fairness and robustness of the election process itself, and to the extent that it may erode faith in the process, it brings every other election and the result it produces into doubt. This strikes at the roots of the........

© National Herald