One battle after another: Suvendu Adhikari's fight for the Bengal CM's post

From Congress worker to TMC strongman and now BJP's face in Bengal, Suvendu Adhikari's rise has reshaped the state's politics

Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) leader Suvendu Adhikari is set to become the party’s first Chief Minister in West Bengal after being elected as the BJP legislative party leader on Friday. The BJP won 207 seats, securing a more than two-thirds majority in the 294-member West Bengal Assembly and crushing the Trinamool Congress, which has had a 15-year run in Nabanna, the seat of the state's secretariat.

 

Adhikari, former CM Mamata Banerjee's mentee-turned-bete noire, led the BJP's campaign from the front, as he once did for Banerjee in Nandigram, which laid the foundation for her rise to power. Now, he has beaten her twice in a row - first in in Nandigram during the 2021 Assembly polls, and more recently in Bhabanipur, Banerjee's pocket borough of sorts, by more than 15,000 votes.

 

 

Rough road to the top

 

Adhikari began his political career with the Congress in 1995, when he joined the party's student wing. His father, Sisir Adhikari, was also a Congress politician and later became a Union minister of state during former Prime Minister Manmohan Singh’s second term.

 

After just three years with the Congress, Adhikari threw in his lot with the Trinamool Congress (TMC) in 1998, shortly after it was founded. He entered the state Assembly in 2006 after winning from Kanthi Dakshin.

 

Over the years, Adhikari rose to become one of Mamata Banerjee’s closest political aides. He played a central role in the 2007 Nandigram agitation, a movement that cemented Banerjee's stature as both a street-fighter and giant-killer as the TMC routed the CPM, which had been in power in the state for over three decades.

 

The TMC’s win also bumped Adhikari’s political standing on the national stage - he entered the Lok Sabha for the first time from Tamluk, winning the constituency in both the 2009 and 2014 general elections.

 

After the TMC retained power in 2016, Banerjee brought Adhikari into the state Cabinet, first as transport minister and with additional portfolios tacked on to his workload later.

 

An allegiance that couldn't hold

 

Once regarded as Mamata Banerjee’s political heir and among the TMC’s most influential leaders, Adhikari switched allegiance in December 2020. He resigned from the Cabinet and left the party before joining the BJP two days later in the presence of Union Home Minister Amit Shah. Adhikari's switch was a big win for the BJP, given that Bengal has long been a jewel in the party's imagination, being the home state of Syama Prasad Mookerjee, who founded the Jana Sangh, the ideological precursor of the BJP itself. Following the 2015 crossover of Himanta Biswa Sarma of Assam from the Congress, a move that had already helped the BJP make inroads into the Northeast, the saffron party now finally spied a fighting chance of making deep inroads into Bengal and beyond.

 

Adhikari's move was a particularly deep cut for the TMC, given he knew the contours of the TMC almost as well as the back of his hand. The reason for his exit, though, was fairly anodyne by the standards of Indian politics: Banerjee had started to rely more and more on her nephew Abhishek Banerjee, effectively anointing him her political heir. This change in the order of succession, was seen as denying Adhikari his due after all he had done for the party.

 

Adhikari, himself a scion of a political family, refused to go gently into the night. In the 2021 Assembly elections, he contested on a BJP ticket from Nandigram - where it all began - against Banerjee, beating her by a slender margin. Despite his win, though, the BJP fell well short of a majority, even though they significantly increased their tally in the state with 77 seats, up from a measly three in the previous elections.

 

The Nandigram result, though, strengthened Adhikari’s stature within the BJP, leading to his appointment as Leader of the Opposition in the West Bengal Assembly.  In the 2026 elections, he took the battle to Banerjee's home turf of Bhabanipur. This time, the outcome was even more drastic: he beat her by a  margin of more than 15,000 votes, a thumping victory by any measure. Across the state, the TMC slumped to a paltry 80 seats, failing to cross the three-figure mark. This meant that for the first time, the BJP would have a government in the state where its ideological foundations lay.    

 

And no one can claim more credit for the win than Adhikari. Now, he has the distinction of not only winning the state for the party, but will also go down in the history books as the first BJP chief minister of a state that has long been seen as firmly antagonistic to the saffron party.