India, May 11 -- As Shuvendu Adhikari takes an oath as West Bengal's first BJP Chief Minister on Rabindra Jayanti, May 9, the symbolism of the date is impossible to ignore. After a long and intense election campaign built around Hindutva, border security, Bengali identity and development politics, the choice of Rabindranath Tagore's birth anniversary for the swearing-in ceremony appears to be a carefully crafted political message. The question many are now asking is whether this marks a genuine ideological shift towards Bengal's syncretic cultural ethos, or whether it is simply a softer cultural packaging of the same political agenda.

West Bengal had already witnessed one historic political transformation in 2011, when power shifted from...