A blossoming lotus in Bengal 

THE lotus has finally blossomed in West Bengal. The state had long resisted the Bharatiya Janata Party's relentless efforts and vast resources to capture power, establish a double-engine sarkaar and complete its dominance over states north of the Vindhyas, barring the tiny territories of Jharkhand, Himachal Pradesh and Punjab, with Jammu and Kashmir as an outlier.

Dislodging Mamata Banerjee — a three-time Chief Minister, an iconic leader and a phenomenon in Indian politics — forced the BJP’s central leadership into overdrive, as she had proved nearly impossible to unseat.

What ultimately defeated Mamata Banerjee was a carefully crafted strategy based on a granular assessment of weaknesses and strengths.

On the one hand, the precision of exclusions and deletions of voters through the Special Intensive Revision (SIR) of electoral rolls worked to the BJP’s advantage. On the other, the wedges it planted helped prevent the Muslim vote from consolidating behind Mamata Banerjee.

The further consolidation of the Hindu vote by carving out a constituency of Hindu refugee settlers in the Matua and Namashudra belt as well as in the Rajbangshi territory, and the advantage the BJP saw in the resurgence of the Communists and the Congress worked together to deliver its victory bit by bit in Muslim-dominated districts and in South Bengal.

The infighting within the Trinamool Congress, exacerbated by the 73 new candidates the party fielded, affected its capacity to win.

By targeting the erosion of governance, with party control overtaking the police and administration in the 15 years of the Trinamool Congress's unchallenged domination, along with all other variables, the BJP succeeded in capturing the elusive jewel in the crown, West Bengal.

It required the concerted efforts of the BJP's master planners and managers, men like Prime Minister Narendra Modi, Home Minister Amit Shah and Environment Minister Bhupender Yadav to fight and win against the one-woman party of Mamata Banerjee.

The consequences of Mamata Banerjee's defeat are not limited to West Bengal. It will affect the morale of the loose confederation of parties in opposition to the BJP under the INDIA collective banner. The downfall of the Trinamool Congress in West Bengal means that the BJP is the ruling party across North India while it is not in power in the southern states of Kerala, Tamil Nadu, Karnataka and Telangana.

As an icon of resistance to the BJP's domination, Mamata Banerjee's defeat erodes her stature, but it may increase her nuisance value if she can figure out how to use it, without looking like a sour loser.

The undercurrent that contributed to the BJP's success was the feeling that Mamata Banerjee's party had to go; any change was better.

The BJP’s determination matched voters’ expectations for change and that the BJP would be a better option. It led to the nearly two-third majority that the party won. The same undercurrent articulated an entirely new consciousness among voters: that if the BJP failed to be satisfactory, it would be rejected in another election.

Since 1952, West Bengal has had three ruling regimes, except for the 10 years between 1967 and 1977, when there were unstable coalitions. It takes voters in West Bengal to make up their minds about regime change and the BJP is tenacious once it seizes power. How the state negotiates its relationship with the BJP will be interesting to watch.

The BJP has won in West Bengal, but uneasy lies the head that wears the crown. It has to find a chief minister to head the government. Its current crop of leaders, including Suvendu Adhikari — who helped keep the BJP at the centre of attention — has not been anointed as the Chief Minister.

There are cracks within the state BJP that need to be dealt with. The party's response to questions on leadership is classic — the headquarters will decide. The subtext is that all important decisions will be taken in Delhi, by the Prime Minister and Home Minister and perhaps some other top leaders of the BJP, not by people in West Bengal.

As a short-term exercise, the fissures and cracks in West Bengal could be managed to deliver the BJP its much-desired victory in West Bengal. Over the next three years, until the 2029 Lok Sabha elections, the BJP will have to make sure that it is seen to be working for the changes it promised to voters.

For the election, the EC pulled out all the stops by roping in 2.5 lakh Central security forces, administrative and police officials from mostly BJP-ruled states, transfers and appointments of local officials and more or less taking over the day-to-day management of the basic functions of governance, particularly law and order.

That, however, is a temporary state of affairs; how the BJP handles a smooth transition from centralised administration to a routine state administration will be a tough call.

To fulfil its campaign promises, the BJP has to deliver cash into the hands of women and unemployed youth on the one hand, implement zero tolerance to ghuspaithiyas (illegal, primarily Muslim, infiltrators) by deporting them, roll out the Uniform Civil Code, enforce the amended Waqf Act, seal the borders with Bangladesh and fulfil Modi's guarantee of giving citizenship to Hindu refugees — Matuas, Namashudras, Rajbangshis and others.

The first set of promises requires that the new government finds the money that the BJP has insisted West Bengal does not have to squander on "revdis" (doles). For the second set of promises, the BJP will have to deal with resistance, if West Bengal reacts as it has done in the past to social destabilisation. For the third set of priorities, the BJP will have to figure out where to deport the ghuspaithiyas. Bangladesh is perfectly clear that there are no Bangladeshi ghuspaithiyas in India. The question is: where will those identified and deleted as ‘ghuspaithiya’ voters by SIR go?