By Sandeep Verma 
Kolkata, May 6: West Bengal just had its biggest political upset in a generation. And within 48 hours of the votes being counted, people were already dead, party offices were on fire, and a woman was on live television with a bandage wrapped around a head that had absolutely nothing wrong with it.
Welcome to Bengal after an election.
First, What Actually Happened at the Ballot Box
BJP got 207 seats. In a state assembly that has 294 seats total. That is not a win. That is a wipeout.
Mamata Banerjee has been running West Bengal since 2011. Fourteen, fifteen years of absolute dominance. Her Trinamool Congress party had 213 seats after the last election in 2021. This time they came back with 78. Her entire political machinery, her cadres, her rally culture, her whole “Bengal is mine and outsiders stay out” narrative, voters looked at all of it and said they were done.
And then, as if the universe wanted to make it personal, she also lost her own seat. Bhabanipur, the constituency that was practically her home turf, went to Suvendu Adhikari. The same Suvendu Adhikari who used to be one of her closest aides before he switched to BJP a few years back. Losing to a former loyalist, in your own backyard, after a 15-year run in power. That is a particular kind of political pain.
By Tuesday evening the victory celebrations were already mixing with something much darker on the streets.
The Violence Started Almost Immediately
This is going to sound familiar to anyone who has followed Bengal elections before. After the 2021 results, post-poll violence was so widespread it made national news for weeks. After the 2023 Panchayat elections, same story. There is a grim tradition in this state of election winners and losers settling scores the moment the counting is done.
This time was no different, except the scale of the BJP win made the power shift more dramatic than usual.
By Wednesday, reports were flooding in from Howrah, Birbhum, South 24 Parganas, Nadia, Bankura. Clashes, vandalism, attacks on workers from both parties. At least four confirmed deaths, possibly more depending on which reports you follow.
Yadav Bar was 48 years old. A BJP supporter from Udaynarayanpur in Howrah. He was walking back home after celebrating his party’s election victory. Someone attacked him on the way. He died. His family says TMC workers were responsible.
Abir Sheikh was a TMC worker from Nanur in Birbhum. His family says BJP supporters killed him.
In New Town, Madhu Mondal, also a BJP worker, was beaten to death during a victory procession. The BJP MLA who had just won from that area, Piyush Kanodia, found himself standing over Mondal’s body with a garland in his hand a few hours after winning. He had won by 316 votes after a recount. That image of a brand new MLA garlanding a murder victim in his own constituency went everywhere.
In Beliaghata in Kolkata, a TMC worker named Bishwajit Pattnaik was found lying badly injured outside his own house late Monday night. He did not survive. Family says BJP supporters did it.
Four people. Four families. Real people, not talking points.
The Sword Thing in Jalpaiguri Needs Its Own Paragraph
Because it really does.
Krishna Das is a TMC candidate who lost his seat in Jalpaiguri district in north Bengal. After losing the election, he reportedly rounded up a group of supporters and walked through the area. They were carrying swords. Not sticks, not lathis. Swords.
During this march, they allegedly attacked a group of BJP workers who were simply going to the Bodaganj Temple to pray. Six BJP workers were hospitalised with injuries.
Someone filmed this. Of course someone filmed this. The video spread immediately. A losing candidate marching with swords and attacking people going to a temple the morning after the results. It is genuinely difficult to imagine a worse look for any political party in any circumstance.
TMC Offices Got Hit Too
To be clear, this was not all going one way.
Trinamool Congress offices in multiple towns across the state were broken into and trashed. Panihati, Ghatal, Asansol, Diamond Harbour, Falta. Furniture broken, walls stripped, party flags ripped down. The BJP says the party had nothing to do with it and these were local incidents. Maybe. But it happened in too many places, too quickly, to look entirely spontaneous.
Now the Bandage. The Absolute Bandage.
Here is the part of Wednesday that will be remembered long after the specific death toll numbers are forgotten.
Somewhere in West Bengal, a woman connected to the Trinamool Congress decided that the best move was to wrap a bandage around her head and go stand in front of television cameras. She told reporters she had been attacked by BJP workers. She looked injured. She had a bandage. It seemed credible enough for a second.
Then someone standing right there, right in that same group, walked up and pulled the bandage off her head.
Nothing. Not a scratch. Not a mark. Completely normal head underneath a completely fake bandage.
The crowd around her erupted. The cameras caught all of it. And that clip went absolutely nuclear on social media within the hour. By afternoon it was the most shared video coming out of Bengal. BJP handles were posting it with obvious glee. Opposition politicians were posting it. Regular people who normally have no strong political opinion were posting it because, honestly, it is the kind of thing that is hard to look away from.
Nobody from the TMC addressed it publicly on Wednesday. No statement, no explanation, no attempt to provide context. Just silence while the clip clocked millions of views.
Nobody knows for certain if she came up with this on her own or if someone told her to do it. Either way, the image stuck. A party that is already trying to absorb one of the worst electoral defeats in its history, and now this is also the story of the day.
There is a serious conversation to be had about genuine victims of post-poll violence who may now find their claims treated with extra suspicion because of moments like this. That is the real damage a stunt like this does. It muddies everything.
BJP Won. Now They Have to Actually Do Something About This.
Samik Bhattacharya, the BJP’s state president, held a meeting in Bidhannagar and said all the right things. Post-poll violence will not be tolerated. Anyone from the BJP found involved will be expelled. The administration must act without looking at party affiliation.
Fine. Good. But here is the thing.
The BJP spent years in opposition telling voters that Bengal under Mamata was lawless, that the police were TMC’s private army, that victims of political violence had nowhere to turn. They were not entirely wrong. There is a documented history of exactly that kind of misuse of state machinery in Bengal.
But now they are the state. The police answer to their government from here on. So what happens to the FIRs filed in these deaths? What happens to the BJP workers who allegedly ransacked TMC offices? What happens to Krishna Das of the sword march in Jalpaiguri?
Those outcomes will say far more about what kind of government this is going to be than any press conference.
Mamata Is Still Here
She is not resigning. She said so clearly. Lost her own seat, lost 130 seats compared to last time, and she is staying on as party chief and plans to lead the opposition in the assembly.
You can call that stubborn. You can call it brave. In Indian politics it is mostly just standard. Very few political leaders in this country leave on their own terms, and Mamata Banerjee is not built for quiet exits.
What she does with the next few years in opposition, how the TMC rebuilds or fails to rebuild, that is a story that is just starting.
The Bigger Picture
West Bengal has 10 crore people. It is a state with a complex, layered history, a fiercely independent political culture, and a tradition of passionate, sometimes violent, democratic participation. The people who voted in this election, the ones who stood in lines across Birbhum and Bankura and Bhabanipur and everywhere else, deserve better than what the next few days are showing them.
They voted for something. Change, stability, accountability, whatever each of them was carrying in their head when they pressed that button.
The central forces are still on the ground. Cases have been filed. Courts are watching.
Whether justice follows, whether the new government actually means what it says about law and order, whether the cycle of post-poll violence that has defined this state for decades finally breaks under new management, none of that is clear yet.
But Bengal is watching. And so is the rest of the country.
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