BJP Breaches Bengal: Modi Reclaims Momentum After 2024 Stumble

India’s Bharatiya Janata Party has captured West Bengal for the first time in the state’s history, winning more than 205 of 294 assembly seats and ending Mamata Banerjee’s 15-year run in power. The result does more than flip a state. It restores Narendra Modi’s political momentum after his party fell short of a parliamentary majority in 2024, and it weakens one of the opposition’s most visible regional power centers.

Banerjee’s Trinamool Congress, the party she founded in 1998, was reduced to around 80 seats...