Bengal appeared headed for a political rupture on Monday as the Bharatiya Janata Party moved comfortably past the majority mark in the 2026 Assembly election count, threatening to end Mamata Banerjee’s 15-year hold on power and push the Trinamool Congress into its deepest crisis since taking office in 2011.Trends available through the counting process showed the BJP leading well above the 148-seat halfway mark in the 294-member Assembly and moving towards the 200-seat zone, while the Trinamool was trailing far behind. The scale of the shift, if sustained through the final rounds, would mark the BJP’s first government in West Bengal and its most consequential breakthrough in eastern politics.
Counting was conducted for 293 constituencies, with polling in one seat set for a later date. Voting took place in two phases on April 23 and April 29, after a campaign dominated by identity, welfare, corruption allegations, border politics and the fallout from a large-scale revision of the electoral rolls. Turnout crossed 92 per cent, the highest recorded in the state, though the figure was shaped by a smaller voter base after the Special Intensive Revision removed millions of names from the rolls.
The SIR became one of the defining issues of the election. More than 90 lakh names were deleted during the revision, with officials citing categories such as absent, shifted, dead and duplicate voters. Opposition parties and civil society groups alleged that the process disproportionately affected vulnerable communities, migrant workers and poorer voters, particularly in districts along the Bangladesh border and minority-heavy areas. The Election Commission of India maintained that the revision was intended to clean the rolls and improve electoral integrity.
For the Trinamool, the numbers pointed to a dramatic reversal after three successive Assembly victories. Mamata Banerjee built her dominance by defeating the Left Front in 2011 after 34 years of communist rule, then expanding welfare schemes, consolidating women voters and presenting herself as Bengal’s principal defender against the BJP’s national machine. That model appeared under severe strain as the BJP converted its long campaign against alleged corruption, recruitment scams, local-level strongmen and political violence into a state-wide electoral lead.
Suvendu Adhikari emerged as the BJP’s central figure in the contest. A former Trinamool leader who broke with Mamata Banerjee before the 2021 election, he had already become the party’s most prominent face in the Assembly after defeating her in Nandigram five years earlier. This time, he was projected as the BJP’s principal campaign spearhead in Bengal, combining organisational reach in south Bengal with a sharp anti-Trinamool message.
Mamata Banerjee’s own contest in Bhowanipore drew intense attention as trends showed pressure on the Chief Minister in her Kolkata stronghold. Bhowanipore has long been central to her political identity, and any narrowing of margins there would carry symbolic weight beyond the seat itself. Trinamool leaders had entered counting day insisting that exit polls had misread the ground, but early and mid-day trends suggested the party was struggling to contain anti-incumbency across multiple regions.
The BJP’s advance appeared broad-based. The party had long held strong pockets in north Bengal and parts of the western districts, but its challenge in past elections was to break Trinamool’s hold over south Bengal and urban-peri-urban belts. The 2026 trends suggested gains in areas where welfare delivery, cadre networks and minority consolidation had earlier helped the ruling party withstand BJP pressure.
Congress and the Left Front remained marginal players, despite efforts to recover space from both the Trinamool and the BJP. Their limited seat presence reinforced the bipolar nature of Bengal’s politics, with anti-Trinamool sentiment largely flowing towards the BJP rather than reviving the older opposition formation. Smaller parties and independents had pockets of influence but did not appear to alter the larger direction of the contest.
Suspended Trinamool MLA Humayun Kabir added another layer to the campaign after launching the Janata Unnayan Party following his suspension over his proposal to build a mosque modelled on Babri Masjid in Murshidabad. His move was watched closely in minority-dominated pockets, though the wider trends suggested that the contest remained overwhelmingly shaped by the BJP-Trinamool confrontation.