From Red Bengal To Right Bengal: Why Suvendu Adhikari's Rise Is More Than A Regime Change

Last Updated:May 09, 2026, 15:12 IST

The state has not just changed its government; it has changed the direction of its political civilisation

From Mamata Banerjee marching to Writers’ Building followed by thousands of her workers, supporters and commoners in 2011 as the face of “Poriborton", to Prime Minister Narendra Modi entering Brigade Parade Ground in an open saffron truck, flanked by new chief minister Suvendu Adhikari and Bengal BJP president Shamik Bhattacharya—Bengal’s political journey has undergone a dramatic transformation.

The images themselves tell the story. PM Modi, bowing on stage, touching the feet of a 98-year-old BJP worker Makhanlal Sarkar, who was a close aide of Syama Prasad Mookerjee, and warmly embracing Adhikari; these are the moments rich with symbolism, emotion, and political messaging. From the era of street marches and ideological battles to today’s grand political spectacle and personality driven mobilisation, West Bengal has indeed come a long way. Yet through every shift, one thing remains unchanged. Bengal’s politics continues to be intensely emotional, deeply symbolic, and larger than life.

West Bengal did not merely witness a change of government on Saturday. It witnessed the collapse of an age-old political grammar, which was exclusive to the state.

ALSO READ | Will Suvendu Adhikari Get The One Thing That Jyoti Basu & Mamata Banerjee Enjoyed In Bengal?

The symbolism was impossible to miss at the swearing-in ceremony of Bengal’s first BJP government since Independence. Among the first five cabinet ministers taking oath were representatives from Mahila (women) leadership, Matua community, OBC blocs, upper-caste Hindu society and North Bengal, a carefully curated social coalition that BJP spent years engineering in Bengal. This was not just accidental optics or an attempt to please cadres and leaders. It looked like a formal unveiling of a new social order.

And standing at the centre of it was Adhikari, once Mamata Banerjee’s most-trusted lieutenant, later her fiercest challenger, and now Bengal’s first BJP chief minister. In a single political lifetime, just in a decade, Adhikari has travelled through nearly every rung of power in Bengal politics—MP, MLA, minister in Mamata’s cabinet, Leader of Opposition (LoP) against Mamata, and now the man heading the saffron takeover of Nabanna. Few politicians in contemporary India have embodied ideological migration as dramatically as him. His rise also validates a politics many once dismissed as electorally impossible in Bengal—aggressive Hindu consolidation cutting across caste lines.

Beyond Ballot Boxes

For decades, Bengal’s political identity was built around Left intellectualism, welfare populism, linguistic regionalism, and liberal ethos with a carefully curated discomfort with overt nationalism. Politics here revolved around class before community, subsidies before aspiration, and regional pride before civilisational identity.

That ecosystem has now cracked open.

The new Bengal BJP is not merely replacing Trinamool Congress, a party that was born out of a land movement, devoid of ideological commitment and driven by a leader, a personality cult—Didi. BJP is now also replacing a Leftist-socialist ideological ecosystem that dominated the state for nearly half a century.

A state once driven by socialist-communist rhetoric and dole-heavy governance is visibly shifting towards a more protectionist-capitalist social imagination, one where business, religious assertion, border security and national identity are no longer politically awkward themes. The transformation is cultural as much as electoral. There was a time when Syama Prasad Mookerjee barely figured in Bengal’s mainstream political discourse. Government events rarely or never invoked him. His legacy survived mostly within ideological pockets.

Now, a 98-year-old BJP karyakarta who once worked with Mookerjee was publicly felicitated during the celebrations, an image loaded with historical messaging. Bengal’s forgotten Right wing was not just remembered, it was ceremonially restored into legitimacy.

Adhikari understood this churn earlier than most.

Even while inside Trinamool Congress, he repeatedly signalled a psychological proximity towards RSS-style nationalism, through calibrated Hindutva messaging, sharper religious positioning and a rhetoric that steadily moved beyond Trinamool’s older soft-regionalist vocabulary. His departure from Trinamool was organisationally significant, but ideologically it had begun much earlier.

What makes this transition extraordinary is Bengal’s historical context. This was the state where communist trade unions shaped streets, where nationalism was often viewed suspiciously if wrapped in overt religiosity, and where Delhi-centric politics traditionally triggered cultural resistance.

Today, the same Bengal is producing full-throated nationalist outpouring, mass Hindu consolidation and open embrace of a right-wing political vocabulary. That shift did not happen overnight. It arrived layer by layer—through border anxieties, demographic debates, refugee politics, post-poll violence narratives, welfare fatigue, and the BJP-RSS ecosystem’s relentless social penetration.

This is why Bengal 2026 cannot be read merely as an anti-incumbency election. This is the first time post 1947 when Bengal witnessed a new party coming to power without needing to spearhead a land movement. The Left Front came to power riding on Operation Barga, the land reform movement, and Mamata Banerjee was propelled to her seat of power by the anti-land acquisition movement of Singur and Nandigram. The state has not just changed its government; it has changed the direction of its political civilisation.

News india From Red Bengal To Right Bengal: Why Suvendu Adhikari's Rise Is More Than A Regime Change

Read More