Bengal Reclaims Itself

Hardeep Singh Puri

Howrah was once called the Sheffield of Asia. The jute mills along the Hooghly were the largest concentration of organised industry on the subcontinent. Kolkata was India’s commercial capital, head office to the Birlas and the Tatas, to ITC, Britannia, Coal India, Hindustan Motors, Garden Reach Shipbuilders. IISCO at Burnpur dates to 1918, Durgapur Steel Plant to the Second Plan. In 1950-51, Bengal produced roughly 27 per cent of the country’s manufacturing output. I knew that Calcutta. Before I joined the Foreign Service, one of my first jobs was at Hindustan Lever in the city, and Calcutta then was still a place where a young man arriving with his trunks could be sure he had come to where the country’s commerce was conducted. The lights stayed on. The trams ran. The companies hired.

What had taken a century to build was dismantled by something more deliberate than economic mismanagement. The Left Front took office in 1977 and held it for thirty-four years. Beneath the rhetoric of the working class, an organised shadow state took root. Permission to build, to run a shop, to set up a kiln, to register a transport route, to hold a panchayat meeting, came with a cut. The cadre collected. The party banked. The unionism that drove out capital was the visible part. The extortion that drove out the citizen was the part the cameras did not film. By the 2000s, when the Left Front itself attempted to reverse course and bring Tata Motors to Singur, the Trinamool Congress in opposition staged a hunger strike that drove the project to Gujarat in 2008. The mafia changed colours; it did not dissolve.

The Trinamool Congress took power in 2011 on the promise of poriborton. What followed was the same machinery in a new uniform. The cut became cut-money. The cadre became syndicate. Bengal’s 27 per cent share of national manufacturing has fallen below 5 per cent. Per capita income, once 127 per cent of the national average, has slipped to 84. More than six thousand registered companies have moved their head offices out of Kolkata. The children of Bengal who would once have worked in Howrah or Salt Lake now live in Bengaluru, Hyderabad, and Pune. The voter who watched her jobs and her money walk out of the state had a score to settle, and a ballot in her hand to settle it with.

At the centre of the score was a record on women that no incumbent in independent India has had to defend. A woman Chief Minister presided over the torture and killing of the women of her state. The rape and murder of a postgraduate trainee doctor at the RG Kar Medical College in August 2024. The night-long vandalism at the crime scene by a mob the Kolkata Police chose not to disperse. The Calcutta High Court’s order transferring the investigation to the Central Bureau of Investigation, on the finding that the Kolkata Police’s enquiry did not inspire confidence. The forty-two-day strike by junior doctors, many of them women.

Sandeshkhali, January 2024. The women of an island in the Sundarbans came out into the streets against a Trinamool district council member who remained a fugitive for fifty-five days while the State Police filed nothing. A Chief Minister whose own movement once spoke of poriborton has presided over a regime in which the women of her state had to seek refuge in courts, in central agencies, and on the streets, against her own cadre. It is reprehensible. It is unconscionable.

What the women of Bengal had to endure was matched only by what the state’s young people had to give up. Twenty-one crore rupees in cash, recovered from a single locked flat in Salt Lake on the night of the first Enforcement Directorate raid. Further recoveries on associated properties pushed the total past fifty crore. The arrest of the sitting cabinet minister Partha Chatterjee, who as Education Minister had presided over the West Bengal School Service Commission. The Calcutta High Court cancelling, in April 2024, the appointments of twenty-five thousand seven hundred and fifty-three teachers, Group-C and Group-D staff under a recruitment found illegal at the gate. A ruling carried to the Supreme Court and upheld in 2025.

An entire school recruitment cycle meant to give Bengal’s young people a foothold in life turned into a counter at which posts were sold and the legitimate candidate could not see the queue. Layered above that scam was the ration scam that pulled in another sitting cabinet minister, Jyotipriya Mallick. Layered above, the cattle scam, the cut-money culture, the syndicate raj. The voter understood the connecting tissue. The first to suffer in a state run by a mafia is the citizen who refuses to pay the bribe.

Against this record stood a record of another kind. Four crore twenty-one lakh houses completed under the Pradhan Mantri Awas Yojana over the past decade. Fifteen crore tap-water connections under Jal Jeevan Mission, against a base of three crore in 2019. Ayushman Bharat covering approximately fifty-five crore beneficiaries with a five lakh rupee annual cover. Direct Benefit Transfer rendering obsolete the leakage that once defined every welfare programme in Bengal. None of these are abstractions. They were the floor on which every Bharatiya Janata Party karyakarta in Bengal stood when she asked for the vote.

Behind that floor stood a network. The party’s booth-level cadre, the panna pramukhs, the karyakartas who endured intimidation, threats, and physical violence across electoral cycles, did the unglamorous work of registration, transport, and turnout in conditions other parties had abandoned. The threats against the Prime Minister and the Home Minister, the declarations of what would follow once central forces left, the lives lost in earlier rounds of post-poll violence, were not rhetoric the karyakarta had to be reminded of. She had lived through it. The Honourable Home Minister, Shri Amit Shah, walked Bengal himself, district by district, sometimes returning to the same town within weeks, knowing what his cadre was carrying. What they were attempting was not an electoral upset. It was the breaking of a citadel.

The faces of this breakthrough tell their own story. Smt Ratna Debnath, the mother of the RG Kar victim, fielded by the Bharatiya Janata Party in Panihati and leading by margins that demolished a fifteen-year Trinamool stronghold. Smt Rekha Patra, who stood on her own soil at Sandeshkhali to demand what the state had refused her, and who carried that demand to a contest in Hingalganj. Voters of districts that had been Left for thirty years and Trinamool for fifteen, turning to the lotus for the first time. On Sunday, 4 May 2026, Bengal settled the score. The Bharatiya Janata Party won 206 of 293 declared seats. Forty-nine years of mafia rule, in two successive uniforms, have ended. This was not only an electoral verdict. It was a moral one.

The breakthrough is already being contested. The Special Intensive Revision of the electoral rolls, which removed ninety lakh ineligible names from a state where ineligibility had been allowed to accumulate for 15 yers, is being characterised by the losing side as voter suppression. The data settles the question. Of the twenty constituencies that saw the highest deletions during adjudication, the Trinamool Congress won thirteen. Samserganj, Lalgola, Bhagabangola, Raghunathganj and Metiaburuz, the five with the most deletions, all returned a Trinamool MLA in both 2021 and 2026. Of the forty-nine constituencies in which the winning margin was lower than the number of electors removed during the revision, twenty-six were won by the Bhartiya Janata Party, twenty-one by the Trinamool Congress, and two by the Congress. A targeted exclusion does not produce a near-even split between the winning party and the losing oneThe 92.93 per cent voter turnout, the highest in the state’s history, settled the question of whether the rolls were credible. By disputing the verdict the voter has already delivered, the losing party only confirms the dadagiri the voter rejected, and the wisdom of the choice she made.

Bengal has voted, and Bengal has chosen. What the voter has asked for is not difficult to read. Peace, and freedom from the violence that has shadowed her streets. Prosperity, and the return of work to the city she lives in. Stability, and an administration that does not collect a cut for letting her live. A cultural and economic renaissance in the state that gave the country its first industrial belt, its commercial capital, and the early architects of national administration. The Calcutta I worked in is recoverable. Bengal is ready to resume its contribution to a Viksit Bharat by 2047. Behind every welfare delivery and infrastructure decision of the past decade has been a Prime Minister who treats the citizen as the unit of account. The reward for keeping faith with that citizen has now been recorded.

(The author is Union Minister of Petroleum & Natural Gas)