AL JAZEERA ONLINE

Seema Das, a househelp in New Delhi, took on a two-day journey to reach her village in India’s West Bengal state, changing trains to make sure she got home in time to vote in provincial elections.

Das had previously always voted for the All India Trinamool Congress (TMC) party under Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee, a centrist political force that has been in power in the eastern Indian state since 2011. But this time, she said, her mother-in-law had convinced her that “Didi” – a nickname for Mamata, which translates to elder sister in Bangla – “favours Muslims”.

That’s an accusation that Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s Hindu majoritarian Bharatiya Janata Party has long levelled against the TMC, which emphasises religious pluralism and the protection of minority rights. But for 15 years, Mamata and her party have ruled the state of nearly 100 million, even as the BJP gained ground in a state where it had traditionally been a marginal player.

Yesterday, that changed. Modi’s party won West Bengal, which, analysts say, will be consequential. They say the BJP has successfully used the religious polarisation card and leveraged underlying anti-incumbency to win.

Mamata founded the TMC in 1998, breaking with the Congress party, disillusioned with its refusal to frontally take on a coalition of communist parties that had ruled West Bengal since 1977.

Rising from a humble background, the lawyer-turned-student-activist-turned-politician finally defeated the communists to win the state in 2011. Since Modi became PM of India in 2014, she emerged as a key challenger to the BJP – framing her politics, especially her defence of Bengal’s Muslims, as an act of opposition to Hindu majoritarianism.

She also launched a series of women-centric welfare schemes and pushed back against controversial land acquisition projects sought by big industry.

Rahul Verma, an election observer who teaches politics at the Shiv Nadar University in Chennai, emphasised that “without serious anti-incumbency, West Bengal would not have gotten this kind of result.”

TMC failed to “offer anything new to the voters and to beat strong anti-incumbency sentiments against it”, said Praveen Rai, a political analyst at the Centre for the Study of Developing Societies, in New Delhi.

Before the polling in West Bengal, the ECI carried out a so-called revision of its electoral rolls through a Special Intensive Revision (SIR), which removed more than nine million people – nearly 12 percent of the state’s 76 million voters – from the voting list.

Nearly six million of them were declared absentee or deceased, while the remaining three million were unable to vote because no special tribunals could hear their cases in the short timeframe available before the elections.

TMC and other opposition parties in several states have called out the discrepancies in the revision of the voter list, accusing the ECI of siding with BJP. Right activists and observers believe that the exercise disproportionately disenfranchised Muslims before the election.

However, the analysts who spoke with Al Jazeera, including Sircar and Verma, agreed that the voter revision exercise alone could not have delivered such a decisive victory for the BJP.