In the BJP’s breakthrough win in West Bengal, a major factor was the quieter, more methodical approach of the RSS, whose efforts in the state for over a decade, and the last two years in particular, laid the foundation of the victory.Though Hindu identity politics has a century-long history in Bengal, the RSS and the Bharatiya Jana Sangh (BJS), the precursor to the BJP, failed to establish its presence in the state after Independence. The BJS won nine Assembly seats and a 12.57% vote share in the 1951 election, but it fell off the electoral map afterwards. The long drought came to an end only in 2014, when the BJP won its first Assembly seat in a bypoll. Since then, it has been a steady climb to power — three in 2016, 77 in 2021, and 207 seats in this election.The turning point in electoral terms came in 2021 as it became apparent to the Sangh that the battle against the Trinamool Congress (TMC) could be won, senior RSS functionaries said. In the last two years, the Sangh mobilised 2,000 full-time workers from other states — drawn from its cadre and that of the party — to fill the gaps in the BJP’s grassroots machinery. These workers — all of whose expenses were taken care of by the party — were given a single-point agenda: operate at the hyper-local level, in clusters of villages and urban settlements, and among specific communities and social segments. The Sangh’s role was about creating the social and psychological conditions that would pave the way for the BJP’s political success.After the BJP suffered a setback in the 2024 Lok Sabha elections — it was internally blamed to a large degree on a lack of coordination between the Sangh and the BJP after J P Nadda appeared to suggest in an interview to The Indian Express that the party did not need the RSS anymore — the RSS doubled down and sharpened its strategy.At the helm of the Sangh’s operation in Kolkata were two veteran strategists: sah-sarkaryawah Ramdutt Chakradhar, who has been stationed in the state for the past six years, and ghosh pramukh Ram Chandra Pandey, who has been based in the state for nine years.“There was constant coordination. BJP workers were at the forefront of the political battle, our workers were reaching door-to-door to convince people to vote fearlessly,” said an office-bearer of RSS’s Central Bengal unit. The RSS’s organisational structure in the state is divided into North, Central and South Bengal zones.The 2,000 out-of-state workers operated in rotating shifts, with a minimum three-month deployment. More than 150 senior figures — MLAs from other states and veterans of election management — also camped in the state for nearly two years. These leaders served as the Assembly constituency in-charges and their brief extended beyond conventional campaigning.Story continues below this ad“At several places, even our RSS-BJP workers were afraid and in several places they complained that the TMC people had threatened them. Some of our workers even stopped working because of fear, but we convinced them not to worry. We persuaded them to avoid clashes with TMC workers and focus on door-to-door contact,” said a leader.Deployed across caste, community, women, and student groups, and in teacher and professional networks, these workers organised intimate gatherings of 15-20 people, armed with carefully crafted talking points on Bengali pride, women’s safety, unemployment, and emotive issues such as the RG Kar Medical College rape and murder case and a communal divide.Poll dossiersApart from the ground-level force, the BJP-RSS also made appointments that ultimately bore fruit. The 2016 elections saw the Bhupendra Yadav-Kailash Vijayvargiya duo in charge.By 2021, the party had deployed its joint general secretary for organisation, Shiv Prakash, and national secretary Arvind Menon. Prakash invested nearly five years in RSS-style groundwork. The current BJP general secretary in charge of Bengal, Sunil Bansal, refined the model put in place by his predecessors. A BJP leader from Uttar Pradesh who spent the last six months in Bengal highlighted the data-driven precision with which Bansal and the party operated in this election.Story continues below this ad“Such was the research that all the in-charges of the 294 Assembly constituencies, who were deployed from other states, were given a 20-25 page folder of their seats. It contained details such as local issues, the voting pattern of the last few elections, the main activists in the area, details and contacts of main functionaries of various parties and their weaknesses and strengths. Another folder given during the middle of the campaign contained 20-25 pages detailing everything on every booth,” he said.These dossiers — prepared by a poll-strategy firm working with the BJP since 2016 and managed under Bansal’s coordination — left even local leaders stunned. “We were in the Assembly constituencies equipped with every necessary data. Local leaders and workers were often surprised by our knowledge and understanding of the ground-level information and the leaders of other parties. The list even included which of the TMC leaders in our area could be a loose link and could be approached to work for us,” said the leader from UP.‘TMC provided an opening’The RSS and the BJP could grow, Sangh leaders said, because of the TMC.“If there were no TMC government, the BJP’s victory in West Bengal would not have been possible. Our work in the state grew with the rise and consolidation of the TMC and, under Mamata Banerjee, the communal divide grew in the state because of her Muslim appeasement policies. We had very few Bengali pracharaks prior to 2011 — like in Punjab, where for decades, there were very few Sikh pracharaks. Now, we have a long list of Bengali pracharaks, not only of West Bengal origin but Bangla-speaking people,” said a senior pracharak originally from Kolkata who was deployed across the state during the elections.Story continues below this ad“During the Left years, it was difficult to polarise along communal lines. This became very easy during the TMC years,” another RSS functionary put it bluntly.Pointing to how the Sangh expanded in the TMC years, insiders claimed more than 1,500 daily shakhas — RSS daily drills — now operate across the state. If weekly and monthly gatherings are also considered, the footprint is far higher.“With passing time, we felt a type of hatred for the TMC and its leadership was growing among Bengali Hindus. We found that a large number of women we were approaching had turned against Mamata Banerjee,” said another state-level RSS leader.However, holding shakhas proved to be difficult. “There is hardly any state where holding daily shakha was as difficult as in our state,” said an RSS office-bearer. The TMC-dominated local bodies frequently locked down venues, closed toilets, and disrupted gatherings, a pattern more widespread than the Left’s resistance to the RSS in Kerala. These attacks were particularly acute in south Bengal, said Sangh insiders.Story continues below this ad“We realised that Bengali Hindus had rapidly started feeling uncomfortable with Mamata Banerjee’s leadership and policies. It was like the Samajwadi Party governments, particularly the 2012-17 one that gave us space to consolidate in UP,” explained a pracharak from West Bengal who now works in an RSS-affiliated organisation at the national level.The RSS’s educational front, Vidya Bharati, runs nearly 300 Sharda Shishu Teerth schools in the state, educating 1.5 lakh students and employing around 3,000 teachers. These institutions faced repeated legal cases, raids, and withdrawal of recognition, said a pracharak associated with the education wing.“Our schools were raided again and again and RSS activities were not allowed. Whenever they (TMC) sensed a meeting or camp being held in the schools, raids took place and recognition was withdrawn. We were so afraid that at one time we were thinking of changing the names of these schools to add a suffix such as ‘Public School’ to avoid such actions. In one of the three schools, which are affiliated to CBSE, we got a mandatory no-objection certificate only after a legal battle in courts,” said the pracharak.In February 2001, five swayamsevaks were attacked in a remote village in the South 24 Parganas district. Four of them died in the attack. The sole survivor, Bikarno Naskar, contested and won the Gosaba (SC) seat as a BJP MLA in 2026. Naskar’s story, in a way, encapsulates the journey the Sangh has had to make in a political terrain that was hostile to its growth, one where the social conditions that could allow it to grow did not exist. Till now.