Saffron wave in Bengal, Assam; Vijay's TVK holds trump card in TN, solitary win for Congress in Kerala

Public Lokpal
May 05, 2026

NEW DELHI/KOLKATA/CHENNAI: The BJP is set to form its first government in West Bengal with a landslide victory in the state polls as the Election Commission's (EC) trends on Monday showed that the party has gone past the 200-mark in combined wins and leads in the 294-member Assembly.

The saffron party is also set to retain Assam for a third term, while the latest electoral cycle also saw a spectacular debut in Tamil Nadu by actor-politician Vijay's TVK with 107 wins and leads out of 234 seats to emerge as the single-largest party, a wipeout of the Left as it tasted defeat in its last bastion of a Kerala, and a solitary win there for the Congress, which has been battling diminishing electoral returns.

Three incumbent chief ministers -- Mamata Banerjee (West Bengal), M K Stalin (Tamil Nadu) and Pinarayi Vijayan (Kerala) -- are on their way out, with Banerjee also losing the poll battle against BJP's Suvendu Adhikari in the Bhabanipur Assembly seat in Kolkata.

As votes were counted, the EC's trends showed a landslide victory for the BJP with 206 combined wins and leads out of 293 seats in West Bengal, with the incumbent TMC left reeling at just 81. Re-polling has been ordered in one constituency in the state.

Meanwhile, outgoing West Bengal Chief Minister Banerjee alleged that the mandate in more than 100 seats was "looted".

"We will bounce back," the Trinamool Congress (TMC) supremo said while walking out of the counting centre at the Bhabanipur constituency.

A visibly-distraught Banerjee told reporters that the BJP's victory was "immoral".

"They have looted more than 100 seats," she alleged.

Banerjee found an ally in Gandhi, who too alleged that the mandate in Assam and West Bengal was "stolen".

In a post on X, the leader of opposition in the Lok Sabha said: "Assam and Bengal are clear cases of the election being stolen by the BJP with the support of the EC. We agree with Mamata ji. More than 100 seats were stolen in Bengal."

More than 2.5 lakh personnel of the Central Armed Police Forces (CAPFs), along with state police, were deployed, with the TMC and BJP engaging in a showdown outside several strongrooms where electronic voting machines (EVMs) were stored in the run-up to the counting.

In Assam, where the election was a hot-headed affair too, Chief Minister Himanta Biswa Sarma led the BJP to another straight victory, bagging 82 of the 126 seats, leaving the Congress far behind at 19. State Congress chief Gaurav Gogoi faced his first electoral defeat in Jorhat.

It was a volatile election campaign with issues of the Special Intensive Revision (SIR) of the voter list, electoral rigging and polarisation dominating the discourse.

If West Bengal was one headline of Elections 2026, the other was superstar Vijay, who defied the odds and the taint of a stampede during his rally in Karur in September 2025, in which 41 people were killed. That was clearly in the past as his party broke the bipolar cycle of Dravidian politics in Tamil Nadu.

The ruling DMK that had started the morning at the third position, was at 60 and the AIADMK at 47.

The choice, it appeared, was clear. Joseph Vijay Chandrasekhar appeared set to join the pantheon of MGR and Jayalalithaa as celluloid stars who made it big in the political firmament. The star of hit films, such as "Mersal" and "Leo", went into the campaign with a list of lofty poll promises, including 8 gm of gold, worth about Rs 1.12 lakh, for marriage. Vijay's assurances in the party manifesto also included a monthly assistance of Rs 2,500 for women aged below 60 years and six free cooking-gas cylinders per family a year.

In Puducherry, the All India NR Congress had won or was ahead in 12 of the 30 seats. The DMK stood at five and the BJP at four. The TVK made its presence felt with two seats.

PTI