Listen to this article:

While the protagonists of the so-called Hindu Rashtra celebrate their victory in West Bengal with gusto, liberals have sunk into mourning at the collapse of Bengal’s half-century-long record of electing governments diametrically opposed to the one ruling Delhi and the larger Hindi heartland.

The Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) had conquered Uttar Pradesh – the karmabhoomi of Socialist patriarch Ram Manohar Lohia and Dalit icon Kanshi Ram, once a bastion of backward-class consolidation, Dalit resurgence and Ganga-Jamuni tehzeeb – long ago.

Ahead of the West Bengal polls, the saffron party installed its own chief minister in Bihar too, replacing Nitish Kumar, who traced his political lineage to Jayaprakash Narayan’s historic anti-Congress movement of the 1970s.

Even after losing Uttar Pradesh and much of the Hindi heartland to the Narendra Modi-Amit Shah duopoly, particularly after 2014, liberals still hoped Mamata Banerjee’s unusual fighting spirit would halt the BJP juggernaut in West Bengal. But this state, too, eventually crumbled on May 4, casting a pall of gloom over adherents of syncretism, pluralism and the broader secular-democratic vision of the Indian constitution.

There is little denying that the Special Intensive Revision (SIR) – a legally dubious, computer-driven exercise – identified and deleted lakhs of Muslim and other voters, helping the BJP stage a coup d’état in West Bengal. To the astonishment of constitutional experts, if not the apex court, the Election Commission invented novel categories like “unmapped voters”, “under adjudication” and “logical discrepancies”, as Jawahar Sircar pointed out in The Indian Express on May 9, 2026, disenfranchising nearly 27 lakh genuine voters while adding six lakh unknown ones. Chief Election Commissioner Gyanesh Kumar carried out Hindutva’s “operation” with clinical precision. 

The unnoticed demise of Lalon and Gorakhnath’s traditions

The fall of West Bengal at the hands of Hindutva was merely the climax of a much longer drama. Climaxes naturally attract greater attention from common people, scholars and analysts alike, particularly in the age of instant messaging and AI tools.

Yet even after acknowledging the dubious role of the Election Commission, one fact remains undeniable: statistics clearly show that nearly........

© The Wire