Bangladesh, May 8 -- India's ruling Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) has just won its first election in West Bengal. It has dislodged the All-India Trinamool Congress (TMC) from 15 years in power in the state by taking 207 seats out of 294 in the West Bengal Legislative Assembly polls, leaving the TMC with 80 seats - an astonishingly neat mathematical reversal of the TMC's 213 seats and the BJP's 77 seats that were won in the 2021 polls.

Just before the election, lakhs of electors in the state had their names deleted from voters' lists in an exercise carried out by the Election Commission of India called the Special Intensive Revision (SIR) of voter rolls aimed at cleaning records of dead and duplicate voters. Others, too, ...