On May 4, 2026, Mamata Banerjee, the incumbent Chief Minister of West Bengal, lost her own assembly seat. Bhabanipur, the constituency she had represented for over a decade, went to Suvendu Adhikari of the Bharatiya Janata Party by 15,105 votes, 73,917 to 58,812. Statewide, the BJP won 207 of West Bengal’s 294 seats, ending the Trinamool Congress’s fifteen years in power across three consecutive terms since 2011, and making the BJP the first extreme right-wing party ever to govern the state.
The commentary that followed reached for the usual explanations: three terms is a long time to govern anything, the fallout from the RG Kar Medical College case had not faded, and Hindu voters had consolidated behind the BJP in ways they had not in 2021. All of this is likely true. It is also not the first time the BJP and the Election Commission have faced accusations of manipulating the vote in their favor: national opposition leaders made similar claims about the 2024 general election, under the banner of what became known as “vote chori,” or vote theft. None of it is the whole story. A careful analysis illustrates the increasing importance of vote suppression to right-wing politics as well as the perils of centralized administrative power, even in nominally independent bodies.
A brief orientation for readers less familiar with Indian politics. The Trinamool Congress is a regional party, not a national one; it governs only West Bengal, a state of roughly one hundred million people in India’s east, bordering Bangladesh. Banerjee founded the party in 1998 and has run the state since 2011, building a base heavily concentrated among Muslim voters (about twenty-seven percent of the state’s population) and the rural poor. Just like how the Prime Minister is the head of the central government, the Chief Minister is the head of the state government. The BJP is India’s governing national party, led by Prime Minister Narendra Modi, and has spent over a decade trying and failing to break Trinamool’s hold on Bengal. The Election Commission of India (ECI) is a constitutionally independent body, roughly analogous to a combination of the Federal Election Commission and every US state’s chief election official rolled into one, which administers elections directly rather than merely regulating campaign finance. Its independence from the ruling party is a foundational assumption of Indian democracy, which is precisely why accusations that it has been used as a partisan instrument are as serious as they are.