Long considered a bastion of the Left, the state of West Bengal has been politically dominated by the Trinamool Congress (TMC) for more than a decade, to the extent that the opposition parties here have been reduced to electoral irrelevance. But over the last few years, the TMC has been faced with a new challenger. the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), which has slowly made inroads into the state’s political arena, winning seventy-seven seats in the 2021 assembly election, a significant jump from its 2016 tally of three assembly seats.