West Bengal’s political landscape has undergone a seismic shift with the BJP’s two-thirds majority, ending nearly five decades of opposition between the state and the Centre. The question now is not just about governance, but about what this verdict means for Bengal’s social fabric, its minority communities, and its distinct cultural identity. In this episode of Off The Beaten Track, The Federal spoke to Jawhar Sircar, former IAS officer, ex-Chairperson of the Prasar Bharati Board, and former Rajya Sabha MP, about the road ahead.
How significant is the BJP’s two-thirds majority in West Bengal, and what impact do you think it will have on the state’s society and political discourse?
Right now, there is jubilation in almost all circles — except among core Left-liberals, who are a bit stunned as to how it all happened. The Left and liberals don’t always agree, but they are united in their shock. And among the minorities, there is terror.
This result runs against the grain of Bengal’s culture — and when I say culture, I don’t mean just social culture, I mean the political culture of Bengal as well. Bengal has always leaned a little to the Left through all regimes, whether people liked it or not. We have had 49 years of Left rule — 34 years of the Left Front government and the remaining under populist, bottom-heavy left governance.
Now the BJP is known for following a dual policy. It has its own populist schemes aimed at the bottom layers, and many of them have been quite successful. But they also have a strong inclination towards working for big capital. Bengal is looking at this as a very interesting development. We have not had any big industry here since Haldia Petrochemicals — and even that was done practically by force and sheer grit by the Left government. Before Haldia Petrochemicals, the biggest industrial establishment we had was the Durgapur Steel Plant. So in a way, core industries have either withered away or shut down.
The BJP’s association with big capital gives people hope that they might be able to persuade some investors — with the right locational advantages — to move to Bengal. That hope accounts for a solid 6 to 6.5 per cent swing in the BJP’s favour. The BJP crossed 45 per cent of the vote share.
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A lot of this was also about anti-incumbency against Mamata Banerjee — corruption, gundagiri. You had yourself warned about this?
Yes, that was one of the reasons I gave up my Rajya Sabha membership. It was an early warning to her — please get your house in order, or you are heading into terrible trouble.
Unfortunately, what happens with all political parties — and I underline all — is that the inner circle, call them the praetorian guard or whatever you like, tries to protect the leader and withholds information from them. It happened a great deal with the TMC, which is more personality-driven than ideological — unlike the Left or the Right. People kept telling her everything was alright. That was a lot of nonsense.
I remember that in 2021, just before the elections, she suddenly started consulting me because I had been the Chief Electoral Officer who had conducted two Parliamentary elections in Bengal. She asked me as a neutral person. I told her that her image needed to change. And if you go back and check the internet, you will find that for about four months before the 2021 elections, she went around screaming at her own party — “Return cut money, return cut money”. She was essentially admitting that her party workers had taken bribes, and they started returning money and making public shows of repentance. This time, there was none of that. They were confident they would get through.
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What do the people of Bengal actually expect from this new government?
Start with industry. The hope is that industry will come in and generate jobs — that is number one.
Number two: 49 years ago, when I was just two years into service — I’m talking 1977, when we conducted the post-Emergency elections after Indira Gandhi’s defeat — I was Assistant Returning Officer for Burdwan. That was 49 years ago. We saw the last time the state government and the Central government shook hands. Then the Left came in June 1977, and since then, for almost 50 years, the two governments have been at loggerheads.
Imagine the condition of the people.
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Would you say Bengalis took pride in being in opposition to the Centre?
Yes, yes, absolutely. Non-conformism is something Bengalis cherish. The ideology of the party at the Centre — whether Congress, Janata, or BJP — never quite met the high expectations of Bengal’s intellectuals. That was a factor. But we must remember: government is not slogans, government is not posturing. It is a lot of hard work. Much of it requires civil servants to manoeuvre and negotiate between the Centre and the states — and that became a very tough job when there was animosity on both sides.
The people weren’t always so fussy on their own — they were taught to be fussy. But people like us were stuck in the middle, negotiating between the Centre and the state at really difficult times.
I must say, to the credit of Jyoti Basu and Pradip Bhattacharya, both of them recognised that predicament. I was one of the few bureaucrats who kept moving between the state and Central deputations. The state bureaucracy resisted, saying, “No, we can’t let him go,” but the Chief Minister would intervene and say, “Let him go — he’ll be an asset for us in Delhi.” So I would carry Bengal’s voice to the Centre. The Left had a much more sensible view on this, even if, among the hardcore Left, I was often branded a Central agent.
From what I hear from junior colleagues, the Mamata years were miserable for the bureaucracy. Miserable — because she personalised every issue. The bureaucracy is supposed to be somewhat impersonal — yes-minister style — but she would not accept that. Any secretary who tried to bridge something with the Centre would be pulled up as someone who had compromised her cause, whatever that meant.
So after 49 years, the state and Centre finally have the same government. Does that change things practically?
There is a lot of hope that things will move smoothly now. The government in the state will expect its civil servants to sort out things quickly — “go to that minister tomorrow morning and get it cleared”. Relationships, small bottlenecks — these should clear much faster. Grants that were being held back or delayed should start flowing.
As a bureaucrat, I know the difference between a verifiable objection and a deliberate pinch, where a minister has simply told the file to be parked. All other states were getting their dues while Bengal was being held back. If you met the secretary, he would say, “Ha ha, hum log to dekh rahe hain” (Yes, we are looking into it) — but they hadn’t replied to our letters for months. Sheer stubbornness on either side. That should disappear now.
And then I come back to industry. Bottlenecks should be removed, and normal governance should become easier. But there is a big catch.
Industries do not move in just because of a double-engine government. They move in for various other factors — work culture, infrastructure, ease of doing business. Look at Tamil Nadu, Karnataka, Telangana — all Opposition-governed states that have prospered enormously. Tamil Nadu is one of India’s highest industrialised states despite having Opposition governments throughout. Meanwhile, UP, Bihar, and Madhya Pradesh, with double-engine governments, remain more “bimar”. So this logic that double-engine automatically means progress — Bengal’s voters did not fully understand that this equation does not hold.
What will be the impact of greater radicalisation of Hindutva politics on West Bengal’s social fabric, particularly given the large Muslim population?
That will be very, very hard. Twenty-seven per cent of Bengal’s population is Muslim — and Bengali Muslims, you simply cannot distinguish them from Bengali Hindus by appearance, language, or culture. It is only a part of the BJP’s narrative to make them look like Bangladeshis all the time. Muslims who have been in Malda or Murshidabad for 10 generations have nothing but scorn for that framing. They say, “We are khandani Muslims” — rooted here for generations.
Now the BJP has declared Suvendu Adhikari as Chief Minister. Somebody like Samik Bhattacharya would have been a more reasonable choice. But the BJP and the RSS have chosen someone who will push their agenda — the Bengali counterpart of Himanta Biswa Sarma and Yogi Adityanath.
You must remember that Assam has a complex — if a head count were taken and everyone was given the truth pill, Bengali speakers might outnumber the Assamese. That demographic fear is a real motivating factor there. Bengal has no such motivating factor — other than narrative and manufactured hatred.
Already, irritating things have started. People have begun saying, “Don’t hang beef carcasses openly”. Now, beef carcasses are visible openly all over Bengal. They are now saying, “Please cover them up”. I actually think that’s quite reasonable — just as you would not want pigs strung up anywhere. If something appears unreasonable to a large section of people, there’s a case for sensitivity. So they start with a few reasonable points. And then they move on to what I call the hardcore agenda.
Number one: “We will examine all of you to see whether you are Bangladeshi”. Detect, delete, deport. And anticipating exactly this, Bangladesh’s Home Minister has already issued a statement — “Don’t try this trick with us. You keep your people, we keep ours”.
Now here’s what’s interesting. Through all the noise about Bangladeshi infiltration — from Kashmir to Kanyakumari last year — very few were actually found and paraded. If they had genuinely found thousands of Bangladeshis in Jharkhand, Bihar, or anywhere else, they would have been photographed and splashed all over. They weren’t. The narrative is far stronger than the reality. But Suvendu would like to make the narrative and reality closer together. So that witch-hunt is something we fear.
Do you think people voted primarily on communal lines, or were there other reasons?
Not so much on communalism. There was some disgust at Mamata’s, what shall I say — her playing around with Muslim identity.
The interesting thing is that Muslim enthusiasm for the TMC has been fraying over the last four elections. When results come in from Muslim-dominated areas, you will understand — the Muslims voted largely for the Left and the Congress. The TMC may have lost as much as 8 per cent of the Muslim vote.
And why? Because the Muslims themselves said, “You are using us, you are parading us — but how many schools have you set up for us?” Twenty-seven per cent of Bengal is Muslim, and yet the Bengal Police, even at its lowest level, does not have more than 5 to 6 per cent Muslim representation. If Mamata was genuinely keen about Muslims, instead of wearing the hijab and attending iftars, she could simply have set a target — 2 per cent extra recruitment every year. In 15 years, she would have brought representation closer to population share. That would be recognised. No special quota — just special effort.
Giving Maulanas and Imams subsidies and going and sharing iftars is not secularism. It does not go to work for people.
I am on social media, and a lot of Muslims would tick me off every time I said something critical, saying, “You sound like a Mamata Banerjee supporter”. I got their point.
The youth of Bengal have played a big role that nobody is fully understanding yet. When I went to debate in colleges, I found that every time my opponent from the BJP side made a comment — in my humble opinion a very silly one — they got far more applause than our side. The educated youth were clearly showing their preference. Why? Because 12 years of continuous propaganda reaches somewhere. They were 10 years old when Mr. Modi came to power. Now they are 22. They have heard only this. They have seen only this version of events.
And at the lower level, the youth are angry because Mamata did not give them jobs. Employment for Bengali youth in Kolkata is Swiggy, Zomato, night guards, and such things. Unfortunately, that’s the same everywhere in India — but the youth of Bengal are not always exposed to that comparison. What hurts most is that these young people see a tout from their own area — their age — who joined the Trinamool Congress five or six years ago, and has since moved from a shack to a three-storied house. You understand what I’m saying?
So a combination of these factors explains the additional 8 per cent the BJP got — fraying Muslim support, angry youth, both educated and uneducated, and women also shifting.
Suvendu Adhikari will now be Chief Minister. Will he push for things like a Uniform Civil Code, or aggressive Hindutva-style policies?
Suvendu has this urge to prove himself — to be more BJP than the BJP itself. Because the BJP is controlled by the RSS, and he was never an RSS product. In fact, he used to beat the daylights out of RSS workers once upon a time, back when he was with the TMC. Now he has to prove himself.
So he will go in for the dramatic, and he will go in for unfair play — I have no doubt about that. That could mean, for instance, when Eid comes and namaz has been held on Red Road for 300 years, he says, “No, you can’t do it on the road”. Or he picks up what I’ll deliberately call “popular” — not just populist — issues. There is genuine annoyance in Kolkata, even among strongly secular people, about the azan being carried over the loudest of microphones. If you live in an apartment near a mosque, you stop talking for five minutes. Nowhere in Islam is a microphone mandatory for the azan. Suvendu may very well pick on this issue and gain popularity from it.
So he will start with the soft, low-hanging fruit. But I am talking about Suvendu as someone who has always been on the extreme, who has always been brash, and who will carry out a brash agenda.
Now, ironically, that may not be entirely bad — and I’ll tell you why. A lot of fence-sitters voted for the BJP, rightly giving Mamata Banerjee a well-deserved defeat for her corruption. She had also decimated all other political parties — the Left, the Congress — so there was no alternative. If the BJP indulges in excesses, the realisation of what their true form is will come early. It will be fast-forwarded. Hardline Hindutva pushed immediately will be counterproductive to the BJP in Bengal.
It makes far better sense for Suvendu to be a little more accommodating. But it’s not in his nature. So we will see what happens.
The BJP knows Suvendu Adhikari’s character very well — probably better than you and I. Yet they have decided to go with him. We will see what that means.
(The content above has been transcribed from video using a fine-tuned AI model. To ensure accuracy, quality, and editorial integrity, we employ a Human-In-The-Loop (HITL) process. While AI assists in creating the initial draft, our experienced editorial team carefully reviews, edits, and refines the content before publication. At The Federal, we combine the efficiency of AI with the expertise of human editors to deliver reliable and insightful journalism.)
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