Outside the offices of Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party in Kolkata, the pavement is aglow in the party’s signature orange. Supporters had celebrated the storming of one of India’s last opposition strongholds by tossing handfuls of saffron-coloured powder.
“This is the colour of Bengal now,” declares Ali Hasan, 55, a Muslim BJP official who heads a unit dealing with religious minorities in the state of West Bengal. “The BJP was incomplete without Bengal. Now Modi will turn Bengal into ‘Golden Bengal’,” he adds, in a reference to the area’s past glories.
This week’s election adds one of India’s most populous states to a recent string of BJP victories at state level, marking an extraordinary recovery for the prime minister and his party just two years after losing a parliamentary majority. Now winning states well outside the BJP’s traditional heartlands in the north and west, Modi looks stronger than ever.