Saffron ink: How Bengal’s newspapers covered – and coloured – the BJP’s win

By Monday night, the BJP had established leads in over 200 seats in West Bengal. The numbers on the ECI website were not final, but the picture they painted was already difficult to misread. 

On Tuesday, Bengali newspapers arrived with dramatic front pages, bold headlines, saffron-washed mastheads, pointed wordplay, and opinion and editorials that seemed to primarily give one message – that TMC had handed BJP the victory as much as BJP had won it. 

Sangbad Pratidin

Sangbad Pratidin’s front page carried headlines such as “BJP 200 par sabuj durg churmaar” (BJP crosses 200, Green Fort collapses), with “Bongo” in "Paschim Bongo" (West Bengal) printed in saffron. Then came the cutting pun: “1-9 noy Trinamool” – noy means both 9 and “no” in Bengali, so the headline reads as both a scoreline and a verdict: there is no Trinamool.

An opinion piece titled “Pratham Sari-r Rajya Hobo” (We will become first row State) by Anirban Gangopadhyay, affiliated with the BJP, credited the Prime Minister as the ‘Chief Architect’ of this win. He claimed that now, things like education, health, and jobs will be protected, and no one will have to migrate outside Bengal. The SIR, deeply controversial and fiercely disputed by the opposition as a tool of voter disenfranchisement, was presented simply as a clean-up exercise that “freed the booth”. 

Anandbazar Patrika

The front page of Anandabazar Patrika read in a big bold headline, “Mamata’s collapse, BJP’s rise”. The lead article started with describing the political landscape transformation through colours – red, green and now saffron. 

Another article, titled “Wearing dhoti-punjabi, the Prime Minister's message of ‘change’”, opened with a description of Modi at BJP headquarters in Delhi, dressed deliberately in a white dhoti and punjabi, speaking in Bengali. The clothing was the message before a word was uttered: a subtle rebuttal of Trinamool's long-running charge that the BJP was an ‘outsider party’, it said. 

However, it also pointed out that even as Modi was calling for an end to the ‘cycle of violence’ from the podium in Delhi, post-poll violence had already broken out across Bengal.

An editorial titled “New awakening in Bengal” argued that the BJP’s 2026 victory is not merely an electoral upset but a civilisational shift – the culmination of decades of Hindu nationalist consolidation finally breaching Bengal’s secular-Left cultural fortress. 

It placed the blame for Trinamool’s collapse squarely on governance failure, women’s safety, rampant corruption, administrative decay, and Mamata’s inability to convert grassroots loyalty into credible rule. BJP’s win, the editorial argued, was built on communal polarisation engineered by Modi and Shah, but it was also Mamata’s own failures that left the door open. 

The Telegraph

Their front page was a level ahead in creativity, featuring an illustration of the Howrah Bridge and a megafont headline reading “BJP’s Bengal”, all painted in saffron. 

The lead article, “Saffron tsunami sweeps aside TMC”, also mentioned Modi’s sartorial choice and hailed the BJP’s victory as a “transformation without precedent in modern Bengal.” The article also underplayed the impact of the Special Intensive Revision that wiped out 90 lakh voters. 

“The BJP’s victory was built on two pillars – its own relentless campaign and TMC’s self-inflicted wounds.” 

An Amul ad titled “Bengal Janata Party” also popped up in the newspaper's corner.

Another article titled “Munch on Jhal muri after victory” focused on the symbolic significance of Jhalmuri and how the BJP, which usually distributed laddus after electoral victories, went with Jhalmuri this time.

Its editorial, titled “Change Speaks”, opened by calling the BJP’s victory in Bengal the proverbial cherry on top of its ever-expanding electoral cake, framing it not as a surprise but as an inevitable culmination. It claimed that anti-incumbency did the heavy lifting, and corruption, lack of women’s safety, economic woes and a crumbling job industry pushed voters away. However, it also noted that SIR also tilted the election further in favour of the BJP. 

Ei Samay

Ei Samay, another Bengali daily newspaper, displayed the headline “Saffron Bengal”, followed by “No livelihood, no bread – the gunpowder of anger exploded!”

A picture of Prime Minister Modi in traditional Bengali attire covered the centre of the first page, accompanied by the headline “Modi in Bengali dhoti, address on 25 Baisakh”, and compared it to the anti-Bengali framing by Mamata Banerjee and her party. 

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