Bihar to Bengal: Manufacturing Mandates, Managing Narratives |
The Rashtriya Janata Dal (RJD)-led Opposition in Bihar was shocked when the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) and its allies won 202 seats – an unbelievable tally – out of 243 on May 14, 2025, in Bihar, reducing the former to irrelevance.
Tejashwi Yadav and his allies, Congress and the Left parties, were simply clueless about how they together ended up with barely 35 seats against 112 in 2025 and how the BJP and its allies took their tally to 202 from 122 – just adequate to form the government in Bihar. It was a magic of sorts!
The sense of shock is almost the same for Mamata Banerjee’s All India Trinamool Congress in neighboring West Bengal. The embattled woman leader, her cadres, and even the neutral observers are stunned at how the TMC was reduced to 80 in 2026 from 215 in 2021 and how the BJP jumped to 207 from 77. It’s magic again!
The Hindutva party’s spokespersons, aided by their cabals masquerading as anchors on ubiquitous TV channels, are cantankerously shrill, alleging that Mamata Banerjee, in the course of her three terms as the chief minister, had accumulated anti-incumbency, coupled with misgovernance, a bad law and order situation, and disenchantment against her rule among the voters. They are asking the TMC chief to “introspect” on what has gone wrong with her style of functioning rather than acting as a “law unto herself.”
But the question arises: did Nitish Kumar, leading the Bihar government for three consecutive terms before 2025, face no anti-incumbency? Was the law and order situation so good under the National Democratic Alliance’s (NDA’s) rule in Bihar? Or did the NDA do something stupendously well from 2021 to 2025 that took its tally from 122 to 202 in five years? Were the voters so overwhelmed with the good deeds of the Nitish government in five years that they gave an unbelievable victory to the BJP-Janata Dal (United) (JD (U)) and so disenchanted with the Tejashwi Yadav-led opposition alliance that they reduced it to 35 from........