NEW DELHI: Since 2014, the BJP has been moving from one poll victory to another — both on the national as well as the state level — with seemingly nothing able to stand in the way of the Modi wave.
However, one thorn in BJP’s side was Delhi, where the Arvind Kejriwal-led fortress managed to survive the saffron tsunami not once, but twice.
However, 2025 proved to be a breakthrough year as the BJP broke the 27-year-old jinx to storm back to power in the Capital. It defeated the indomitable Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) by winning 48 seats in the 70-member Delhi assembly.
Bristling with confidence after acquiring the Rajdhani in the North, the party has already given clear indications that its next mission is to make inroads in the eastern state of West Bengal.
Like Delhi, making inroads in the Mamata Banerjee-ruled Bengal has been an uphill task for the BJP for the past two assembly elections.
In the 2016 assembly elections, buoyed by the majority mandate at the Centre, the BJP expected to emerge as a key party but faced an embarrassing defeat. The party won only 3 seats in the 294-seat West Bengal assembly.
In 2019, the BJP came back to power at the Centre with an even bigger mandate and by then had a decent presence in even the northeastern states, where BJP had negligible presence before 2014.
Two years down the line, the party made another attempt to breach the fortress of Mamata Banerjee but to no avail.
In 2021, when the results trickled in, the BJP won only 77 seats with TMC winning a whopping mandate by securing victory on 215 seats. Though the BJP vote and seat share improved substantially, it was far less than the 200-seat mark the party had expected to win in the polls.
Just like Delhi in 2015 and 2020, the BJP fell flat in Bengal in 2016 and 2021.
However, with the BJP finally triumphing in Delhi, Bengal BJP leaders now see the possibility that Bengal may not be “mission impossible” anymore.
As BJP was celebrating its victory in the Capital on February 8, its top Bengal leader Suvendu Adhikari shot off a salvo at CM Mamata Banerjee, saying after the national capital, Bengal would vote for the BJP by uprooting ruling TMC.
“Delhi ki jeet hamari hai … 2026 mein Bengal ki baari hai … (Delhi’s victory is ours … in 2026 it will be Bengal’s turn),” Adhikari said while reacting to BJP’s massive comeback after 27 years of political exile.
Pumped by the BJP’s historic win in Delhi, Bengal BJP chief and Union minister Sukanta Majumdar said Delhi’s victory would serve as a morale booster for party workers in West Bengal ahead of next year’s assembly elections.
BJP’s Amit Malviya, who heads the party’s I-T department, said that “jitters from the Delhi results are being felt in West Bengal” and claimed that “nervous” Mamata Banerjee would go solo in next year’s assembly polls.
“A nervous Mamata Banerjee has told TMC MLAs that there will be NO alliance in Bengal … It is not surprising that she applies a different yardstick to the opposition in Haryana and Delhi but is unwilling to cede space for the alliance at home,” Malviya wrote on X.
