By Ananya Sharma 
New Delhi, May 5: When a rival party loses badly, not everyone in the opposition cries about it. Some quietly smile. A few do not even bother hiding it.
That is exactly what happened after West Bengal and Assam handed the BJP two massive wins on Monday. While the Trinamool Congress was still processing the scale of its collapse in Bengal, some voices inside the Congress were already doing the political equivalent of a victory lap. Not over the BJP. Over the TMC.
Rahul Gandhi saw it. And Tuesday morning, he called it out directly.
He Did Not Mince Words
Gandhi posted on X, and the message was not for the BJP. It was for his own side. For Congress workers and others in the opposition, who were celebrating Mamata Banerjee’s humiliation instead of worrying about what it actually means.
“Some in the Congress, and others, are gloating about TMC’s loss,” he wrote, asking them plainly to put petty politics aside, and reminding them that this is not about any one party, but about the future of India.
Short. Pointed. A little uncomfortable to read if you were one of the people doing exactly that.
The Congress and TMC have never really liked each other. In Bengal, the Congress has been pushed to the margins for years. Squeezed out. Made irrelevant. So there is a very human, very understandable reason why some Congress workers felt a little smug watching TMC bleed on Monday night. Gandhi is basically saying: I get it, but stop. This is not the moment.
So What Actually Happened in Bengal
The BJP did not just win in West Bengal. They won in a way that will be talked about for years.
The party took 202 seats in a 294-seat assembly, crossing a two-thirds majority, and ending 15 straight years of Trinamool Congress rule. That is not a close fight. That is a wipeout. The kind that reshapes a state’s political identity for a generation.
Now, how exactly this happened is where things get complicated and contested.
The election itself was messy before a single vote was counted. One of the biggest fights during the campaign was over the voter list. Around 9 million names were removed from West Bengal’s electoral rolls during a revision exercise, which is roughly 12 percent of the entire electorate, with over 6 million of those names categorised as absentee or deceased. The TMC was furious about this throughout the campaign, saying real voters were being deleted. The BJP said those were fake entries and illegal migrants. Both sides, predictably, had reasons to spin it their way.
After the results, Mamata Banerjee did not concede gracefully. She called the BJP’s victory immoral and said the mandate in over 100 constituencies had simply been looted. Gandhi backed her up on that. He said he agreed with Banerjee’s claims of irregularities and that more than 100 seats were effectively stolen, and he pointed fingers at the Election Commission of India as well.
These are big claims. And they need more than angry posts and press conferences to stick. Evidence, documented and verifiable, is what separates a legitimate grievance from a sore loser’s excuse. Right now, that evidence has not been laid out publicly in any detail. That does not mean it does not exist. It means the coming days will matter a lot.
Assam Was Big Too, People Just Forgot
Everyone is talking about Bengal, which is fair. But Assam quietly had its own significant result.
The BJP won 82 seats in Assam’s 126-member assembly, with the full NDA alliance crossing 102 seats, giving the party a third consecutive term in the state. Three terms in a row. That is not a fluke. Chief Minister Himanta Biswa Sarma, who is as aggressive a political animal as you will find in Indian state politics right now, is going nowhere.
Gandhi included Assam in his mandate-theft argument as well, which means Congress is challenging the legitimacy of results in two major states at the same time. That is a bold position to take. It also puts real pressure on the party to back it up with something concrete.
The Real Reason Gandhi Said What He Said
Here is the thing. Gandhi’s post was not really just about TMC sympathy. It was about stopping a leak before it became a flood.
The INDIA bloc, the opposition alliance put together before the 2024 general elections, is not exactly a tight-knit family. It is more like neighbours who tolerate each other because they share a common enemy. Different parties, different priorities, different rivalries in different states. When something like Monday’s results happens, and one of the bigger partners in that alliance gets crushed, the temptation for everyone else is to start repositioning. To distance. To point fingers. To think about what this means for them, not for the collective.
Gandhi is trying to short-circuit that instinct. By saying this is a democratic emergency and not a TMC failure, he is asking the opposition to react as a team and not as individual parties looking out for themselves. Whether that message actually lands is a different question.
The Congress and TMC are still rivals on the ground in Bengal. An alliance is not happening anytime soon. And within the Congress itself, there are plenty of people who quietly believe the party spent too many years deferring to Mamata and got nothing in return. Those grievances do not disappear because Rahul Gandhi wrote a post on a Tuesday morning.
What The BJP Is Saying
The BJP, for its part, is not spending much time entertaining the mandate-theft narrative. Their leaders have called the results a clear and democratic verdict reflecting public trust. They say the opposition only cries foul when it loses, and they are not entirely wrong that this is a familiar pattern.
Himanta Biswa Sarma, in particular, will likely be pointed out about all of this in the coming days. The Bengal BJP leadership will frame their win as the state finally breaking free of what they have long called TMC’s culture of political violence and intimidation.
The Part That Nobody Wants to Say Out Loud
Here is something worth sitting with. A party can win a legitimate majority, and there can still be irregularities in certain seats. Those two things are not mutually exclusive. India’s elections are enormous, chaotic, and imperfect by nature. Calling an entire election stolen and calling an election entirely clean are both, in their own ways, too simple.
Gandhi’s framing leans fully into one side of that. So does Banerjee’s. So does the BJP’s response. None of them is going to acknowledge the complexity because complexity does not trend on X.
What remains is this: Bengal has changed, possibly for a very long time. The opposition is under pressure. And Rahul Gandhi is trying, loudly and publicly, to keep it from eating itself alive.
Whether the people he is speaking to are actually listening is the only question that matters right now.
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- Ananya Sharma
- Ananya Sharma
- Ananya Sharma
- Ananya Sharma
