Soon after the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) secured the win in the West Bengal Assembly elections, passengers on an IndiGo flight were captured chanting religious slogans.
A video surfaced on Wednesday, May 6, that showed a man, presumably from the state, expressing joy by raising religious slogans Jai Shri Ram, Har Har Mahadev, Jai Durga, Jai Bangla and Bharat Mata Ki Jai. His fellow passengers were heard echoing the chants to celebrate the saffron party’s win.
Communal incidents have already trickled through following the election results, with calls for genocide, forceful changing of historic Muslim-sounding street names and violence across Bengal reported.
The state BJP leader Suvendu Adhikari, likely to be named the Chief Minister, himself had pledged to “work for the Hindus” who voted for him in the Nandigram constituency. He alleged that the Muslim electorate entirely voted for the Trinamool Congress chief Mamata Banerjee, who “wears a hijab.”
A day after scripting a historic mandate in West Bengal, the BJP inched its tally up to 207 seats in the 294-member assembly, following a recount-triggered victory in the Rajarhat-New Town constituency, adding a final layer of drama to an already landmark verdict.
The additional seat came after BJP candidate Piyush Kanodia defeated sitting two-term TMC MLA Tapash Chatterjee by a slender margin of 309 votes after a recount, pushing the party’s final tally from 206 to 207.
At the end of 18 rounds of counting, Kanodia polled 1,06,564 votes, while Chatterjee secured 1,06,255 votes, with Election Commission sources confirming that the BJP candidate would be formally declared the winner shortly.
The result follows Monday’s decisive mandate, in which the BJP crossed the two-thirds mark to end the Trinamool Congress’ 15-year rule and come to power for the first time in the state.
The verdict had also carried significant symbolic weight, with Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee losing the high-profile Bhabanipur seat to BJP’s Suvendu Adhikari.
With the revised tally, the BJP has further consolidated its dominant position, well above the halfway mark of 148 seats, reinforcing the scale of its victory.
For the first time since 1972, West Bengal is set to be governed by a party that is also in power at the Centre, a shift with far-reaching administrative and political implications.
Vote share data highlighted the depth of the shift. The BJP’s vote share rose to around 45 per cent, up from 38 per cent in 2021, while the TMC’s declined to nearly 40.94 per cent from 48 per cent.
In seat terms, the reversal was stark: the TMC’s tally falling from 215 to around 80, even as the BJP surged from 77 to 207 seats, converting organisational expansion into a decisive and historic mandate.
