Jadavpur Falls: How BJP Breached TMC’s Kolkata Stronghold

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With Jadavpur dismantled, there was no stopping for BJP in West Bengal

By ABDESH KUMAR JHA

Kolkata, May 5, 2026 — One of the major stories playing out in the results of the West Bengal assembly polls is the fall of South Kolkata’s most entrenched Trinamool stronghold – Jadavpur. Winning majority of assembly segments falling under Jadavpur parliamentary constituency was not easy. This has never been a BJP territory.

The Trinamool’s grip on South Kolkata’s urban belt, built over years through a reliable minority vote and a disciplined local cadre, made it one of those seats the BJP contested out of obligation more than genuine expectation. While the Election Commission of India does not officially release voter data by religion, demographic estimates and census data provide a clear picture of the Muslim population share in these areas:

Bhangar: This segment has the highest concentration of Muslim voters in the constituency, estimated at over 35–40%. It is a politically sensitive area where minority voting patterns significantly impact the overall result.

Baruipur (East & West): These segments have a moderate Muslim population, generally estimated between 20% and 25%.

Urban Segments (Jadavpur, Tollygunge, Sonarpur): The Muslim voter share in these urban and semi-urban areas is lower, typically ranging from 5% to 12%.

Overall Constituency: The total Muslim population in the South 24 Parganas district is approximately 35.57%, though the specific mix within the Jadavpur constituency is slightly lower than the district average due to the inclusion of heavily urbanized Hindu-majority wards in Kolkata.

The 2026 results marked the first time the BJP won the Jadavpur Assembly seat, historically a stronghold of the CPI(M) and later the AITC. The BJP’s Sarbori Mukherjee won the Jadavpur segment with approximately 46% of the vote, defeating the incumbent AITC candidate. In all four of the seven seats went to BJP – Sonarpur Dakshin (Roopa Ganguly) Sonarpur Uttar (Debasish Dhar) Tollygunge (Papiya Adhikari). Of the remaining three, two went to the Trinamool and one to the Indian Secular Front.

Heading into 2026, the Central leadership decided to use Jadavpur as test case. “If Jadavpur was dismantled, Bengal was in,” was the general refrain. The BJP had stationed Delhi Minister Ashish Sood at the key battleground. An organisation man having served the party in many polls, Sood was tasked to sit with the workers, fix what was broken, and stay until polling day.

Despite his assignment in Delhi, Sood arrived in the constituency roughly a month before polling. He worked the booths across Jadavpur, Tollygunge, Sonarpur Uttar, and Sonarpur Dakshin sitting through worker meetings that regularly ran past 1 and 2 am. The sessions were operational: which booths were underperforming, where the government employee outreach was falling short, which local leaders needed support and which needed replacing.

Workers who had grown used to occasional visits from senior functionaries found the sustained presence unusual and, by most accounts, galvanizing. The atmosphere within the local unit shifted noticeably.

People who had been going through the motions began to treat their individual booth responsibilities with considerably more seriousness.

Sood has done versions of this before in Gujarat in 2012 and 2017, in Goa, in Jammu, in Bihar’s alliance-management trenches. The specifics differ but the method does not: go early, stay late, work the details that senior leaders typically leave to others.

In Jadavpur, that meant past midnight meetings with booth workers, a rally organised properly rather than just announced, and a ground unit that believed, for perhaps the first time, that the seat was genuinely within reach. The result confirmed what the workers on the ground had started to sense in those late nights that this time, the preparation had actually matched the ambition.

Organizing Home Minister Amit Shah’s public rally inside Trinamool-held territory was itself no routine task. The logistics, security, crowd mobilization across multiple assembly segments, coordination with local administration required a ground organization that was actually functional, not just nominally present. Sood anchored the exercise end-to-end.

The rally did what a well-executed rally is supposed to do: it gave workers a visible momentum marker and signaled to undecided voters that the BJP was genuinely invested in these seats. The messaging Shah delivered 7th Pay Commission arrears for state employees, urban infrastructure failures under Mamata, a development-first alternative had been sharpened through weeks of feedback that Sood’s team had gathered at the ground level.

The campaign avoided identity-heavy messaging and focused instead on two issues with genuine cross-community traction: urban infrastructure and the 7th Pay Commission for state government employees, a constituency that felt consistently deprioritized under the Trinamool. That framing worked beyond its intended audience; sections of the minority community, particularly in Sonarpur, had grown tired enough of economic stagnation to at least partially withdraw their automatic support from the AITC.

The BJP won 4 out of 7 segments Jadavpur, Tollygunge, Sonarpur Uttar, and Sonarpur Dakshin. In Bhangar, with a 35–40% Muslim population, Jayanta Gayen did not win but held his ground as the AITC, ISF, and INC split the vote three ways providing the wider arithmetic that helped consolidate the BJP’s gains across the cluster. So on May 4 morning when leads from Jadavpur started to come, Sood told his confidants that West Bengal has been won.

(The writer is a political analyst, who went to West Bengal to study trends as part of his research work)