NEW DELHI: On June 22, 2017, the Darjeeling hills fell silent under an indefinite shutdown called by the Gorkha Janmukti Morcha. What began as a protest against the West Bengal government’s decision to make Bengali compulsory in schools quickly escalated into a renewed, forceful demand for Gorkhaland. Roads were deserted, tea tourism collapsed, and the hills once again became the epicentre of a long-simmering identity conflict.
That moment captures, in miniature, the deeper churn that has defined North Bengal’s politics over the past two decades. Electoral data from 2006 to 2021 reveal not merely a shift in party fortunes, but a steady reconfiguration of political meaning itself. Class gave way to welfare. Welfare, in turn, yielded to identity.
In 2006, the region was firmly under the control of CPM. With 33 of 54 seats, the Left dominance was near-total. Its strength lay in organisation rather. Dense cadre networks, land reforms, and sustained rural penetration ensured stability, even in a region marked by economic backwardness. Yet that stability was brittle. Beneath it lay unresolved questions of ethnicity, language, and regional imbalance.
The rupture came in 2011. The rise of the Trinamool Congress under Mamata Banerjee disrupted the Left’s hold, reducing it to 24 seats while elevating the Trinamool to 16. Yet North Bengal did not swing uniformly. The Left retained pockets of strength, particularly in areas where its organisational roots ran deep. Change arrived, but unevenly. It was less a wave than a fracture.
By 2016, the Trinamool had expanded further, reaching 22 seats, while the Left slipped to 16. On paper, this appeared to signal consolidation. In reality, it marked a transition without resolution. The Left’s decline created a vacuum, but the Trinamool’s welfare-driven politics didn’t fully occupy it. Schemes reached households, but not always aspirations. The gap between distribution and transformation persisted.
Into this gap stepped the BJP. Its breakthrough in 2021—28 seats, the largest share in the region—was not sudden; it was cumulative. Years of calibrated messaging around identity, belonging, and neglect converged with local grievances that had long remained politically under-articulated.
The geography of this shift is telling. Districts such as Cooch Behar, Alipurduar and Jalpaiguri—once Left bastions—swung towards BJP. The Darjeeling hills, shaped by the enduring pull of Gorkhaland, consolidated behind it. The Trinamool held ground in Malda and parts of the Dinajpurs, where demographic factors and minority consolidation played a decisive role. The Left, once hegemonic, effectively vanished from the electoral map.
At the heart of this transformation lies the question of underdevelopment. North Bengal has long perceived itself as peripheral to the state’s political economy. Infrastructure lags. Industrialisation remains limited. Migration is routine. The Left managed this discontent through organisational mediation. The Trinamool attempted to mitigate it through welfare outreach. Neither has fully resolved it. The BJP reframed it.
The tea gardens sharpen this narrative. Spread across the Dooars and Terai, they embody both the region’s economic backbone and its chronic distress. Low wages, periodic closures and fragile livelihoods have long defined the lives of tea workers, many of them Adivasis. Trade unions once mediated this terrain. Their decline created an opening. Welfare schemes provided relief, but not stability. Promises of wage revision and central intervention, aggressively foregrounded by the BJP, found resonance. Discontent shifted allegiance.
Identity movements, long present but electorally contained, moved to the centre of political mobilisation. In the plains, the demand for Kamtapur and assertion of Rajbongshi identity gathered momentum. Recognition, language and autonomy became political currencies. The Left resisted such claims. The Trinamool accommodated them selectively. The BJP, by contrast, made them a rallying point.
Community alignments followed these shifts. Muslim voters, concentrated in Malda and Uttar Dinajpur, moved towards the Trinamool after 2016. Consolidation became a strategy. It proved effective. Adivasi voters in the tea belt, once aligned with the Left, moved first to the Trinamool and then, in significant numbers, to the BJP.
Economic grievance met political opportunity. The Rajbongshi community emerged as a decisive constituency. Its search for recognition found its most assertive articulation in the BJP’s politics.
No longer a peripheral electoral zone
North Bengal today is no longer a peripheral electoral zone. It is a crucible. Old certainties have collapsed. New alignments remain unstable. The questions that animate its politics—of land, labour, language, and belonging—have not been resolved. They have merely assumed new forms.