“It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness…” Charles Dickens wrote these lines for an era caught at the crossroads of revolution and decay, public anticipation and private anxiety. West Bengal’s recently concluded Assembly elections feel strangely similar.AdvertisementFor the winner, it was a long-awaited breakthrough. For the defeated, it was a manufactured mandate. And for the state itself, it was a quiet collapse of a story it had internalised about its own political exceptionalism. Beneath the agency, optics, perception, and outrage lie a quieter unease, where the numbers seem to have settled, but the meaning hasn’t.Also Read | BJP’s sweep in Bengal cannot be reduced to one factor. Here are fiveThere was a time when state elections felt dangerous, chaotic, but unmistakably alive. The political fabric was built around an argument in which every para had a local poll pundit, every tea stall a manifesto, and every adda a debating chamber. Dissent was not only expressed in Bengal but also performed as a cultural memory.What seems to have shifted is not loud but disorienting. The election campaigns were spectacular, the turnout historic, and the emotions authentic. Yet beneath all the hullabaloo sat a gnawing unease that the older electoral assumptions were not fully explaining the changing political landscape. Because for decades, the state had held on to a self-image of political distinctiveness, which, again, to a large extent, was not entirely unfounded.AdvertisementThe Left Front, the longest-serving democratically elected government, ruled uninterrupted for 34 years. While much of North and Western India adapted to the economic liberalisation in the 1990s, Bengal’s regional political identity remained rooted in trade unions, cadre networks, refugee movements and a literary culture that gave the impression that Bengal was somewhat resistant to the winds of change brewing outside the state. Even Mamata Banerjee’s rise in 2011 banked less on hyper-religious consolidation and more on peasant mobilisation.Also, earlier shifts in power came with visible markers. In the 2008 panchayat elections, the Left fared exceptionally poorly, particularly in districts marred by the Singur and Nandigram agitation. Then the turning point came with the 2010 Kolkata Municipal Corporation (KMC) elections, where the Trinamool Congress wrested control of Kolkata, considered the Left’s ideological and intellectual fortress. So, by the time the formal transition came in 2011, the Left’s collapse was a well-rehearsed outcome even before it was ratified electorally.In the 2011 state polls, the BJP’s vote share stood at just over 4 per cent. In the 2014 Lok Sabha elections, it rose to around 17 per cent. In the next Assembly elections in 2016, the vote share crossed 10 per cent despite the party bagging just three seats. The decisive shift came in the 2019 Lok Sabha elections when the BJP won 18 seats and secured a vote share of over 40 per cent. And two years later, it bagged 77 Assembly seats and over 38 per cent vote share, emerging as the principal Opposition in the state.The numbers were too consistent to be dismissed as electoral fluctuations. They pointed at a deeper churning in the political landscape that many Bengalis’ self-perception continued to interpret as fragmented. Despite 2019 and 2021, many in Bengal continued to see the BJP as a force capable of winning votes but culturally incompatible with the state’s self-image.However, even while a large section chose to pride itself on a distinct, secular Bengali identity, there were telltale signs of change. A collapse of the Left cadre machinery swung a significant chunk of anti-TMC votes towards the BJP. North Bengal and the border districts became crucial battlegrounds where the consolidation centred around citizenship anxieties. The RSS, which spent years on grassroots mobilisation, was no longer peripheral. Moreover, the 2018 panchayat elections, marred by allegations of violations and rigging, also accelerated the erosion of Left-Congress as the Opposition, strengthening BJP’s claim as the key challenger to the Mamata-led government.The commentary around the political exceptionalism also obscured another crucial factor: Bengal was never insulated from the material conditions that are compelling enough for governments to be toppled everywhere else.Even before the Assembly verdict this year, Bengal was grappling with unemployment, slow industrial growth, migration of skilled labour, women’s safety, weakening infrastructure, charges of corruption and a deeply entrenched patronage culture. The anti-incumbent anger also acquired flashpoints. The SSC recruitment scam (and the arrest of a former minister), the Saradha-Narada scams, Sandeshkhali, and the RG Kar case, produced an institutional fatigue that was not unique to Bengal, but resembled conditions that have led to political upheavals across the country. So, the question isn’t why Bengal voted the way it did, but why so many assumed it would remain insulated from the outcomes produced by the same factors elsewhere.What further complicated the shift in power was that the anti-incumbent anger did not unconditionally translate into the acceptance of the BJP either. Unlike several north Indian states, where Hindutva politics seamlessly integrates into the dominant linguistic-cultural landscape, Bengal’s political imagination has emerged through overlapping traditions. This is why, even for the Bengali section that was disillusioned with the TMC, the BJP represented an entirely different idea of nationhood and citizenship, and the majoritarian rhetoric, religious polarisation, Hindi-Hindu homogenisation, and a hyper-nationalist discourse sparked concerns for a state that historically bore a porous relationship with the minorities.you may likeThe anxiety was also cultural, with the BJP repeatedly trying to reinterpret the Bengal identity and dismantle their own “outsider tag” by foregrounding figures like Bankim Chandra Chattopadhyay and Syama Prasad Mookerjee, while attacking TMC’s “appeasement politics”, which for many appeared less like inclusion and more like ideological absorption.Taken against this backdrop, what this election did was not just dislodge a government or reorganise an Opposition, but unsettle a story that Bengal told itself for decades without fully questioning whether it still matched the realities beneath.Roy is an Assistant Editor at The Indian Express. namrata.roy@expressindia.com