The road to Delhi now runs through Kolkata. The Bharatiya Janata Party understood this very well and so invested all they had – from the Mo...
The road to Delhi now runs through Kolkata. The Bharatiya Janata Party understood this very well and so invested all they had – from the Modi-Shah machine to Adityanath and their entire leadership, buttressed by the ideological groundwork of Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, money power and the open support of a section of the media.
Since the 2019 Lok Sabha elections, the BJP started to falter in a string of state polls. In the BJP’s calculation, all of that could be reversed over time. West Bengal was a different ball game. After unprecedented gains in 2019, BJP believed that it could seamlessly cross the last frontier to secure its path to victory in the next Lok Sabha elections.
Of course, rational and perceptive observers know that assembly elections do not mirror Lok Sabha choices. Yet in the wake of the spectacle conjured up by the Modi-Shah machine and matched by a media hype, fear had crept in the consciousness of Bengal that the impossible might happen. This fear and disgust led all shades of opinion uniting to defeat the BJP. It worked.
Initially taken aback by their surprise defeat, they soon put their machine to work, hoping to rebuild the road which would take them to...
