Bengal My Way
An edit commemorating the change of government in Bengal, and the decades of struggle behind the mandate.
The Edit
Bengal My Way is an edit commemorating the historical change of government in Bengal, and the long struggle the Bharatiya Janata Party sustained over so many decades to win a strong mandate in West Bengal — a struggle that ultimately paid off.
The Subject
West Bengal has one of the longest-running single-party records in Indian
electoral history. The Left Front governed the state without interruption for
thirty-four years, from 1977 to 2011 — the longest-serving democratically
elected communist government anywhere in the world — before the Trinamool
Congress displaced it and formed the government that followed.
Against that, the Bharatiya Janata Party's position in the state was marginal
for most of its existence. Its growth came late and in steps: a sharp rise in
vote share through the 2019 general election, when it took eighteen of the
state's forty-two Lok Sabha seats, and the 2021 assembly election, which
established it as the principal opposition in a place where it had previously
had almost no legislative presence at all.
That long arc — decades of negligible return followed by a build in a state
where the party had no incumbency, no historic base and no obvious opening — is
the struggle the edit is about.
Where It Landed
The video went viral on Twitter and YouTube, and was re-shared by a number of well-known accounts in the Indic sphere.
