May 15, 2026
Subir Bhaumik
bdnews24.com
What explains the tectonic shift in West Bengal, something tantamount to a colour revolution from Red to Green to now Saffron? Indian political pundits have come up with a range of explanations for how Mamata Banerjee's Trinamool Congress – which projected itself as "more Left than the Left" as she demolished 34 years of Communist rule in 2011 – could go down so tamely to the BJP.
Former top bureaucrat and Rajya Sabha MP Jawahar Sarkar blamed it on the “electoral genocide” - referring to the huge disenfranchisement of nearly 9 million voters in the rundown to the two-phase West Bengal Polls in late April. Of those dropped, many were dead or had shifted out of West Bengal and quite a few could genuinely be illegal migrants from Bangladesh, but nearly half the number were genuine voters, especially the nearly 3 million who have appealed for restoration of their voting rights. Top psephologists Yogendra Yadav and Pronoy Roy have called it a “stolen election” or even “a surgical strike on India's constitutional democracy”. The deletion of 20,000 to even 50,000 voters in most assembly constituencies cost the Trinamool very badly, Yadav and Roy argued. Trinamool leaders agreed.
