May 4, 2026: The elections to Assam, West Bengal, Kerala, Tamil Nadu and Puducherry Assemblies have produced a string of shocking outcomes, especially in West Bengal and Tamil Nadu. For the first time in the electoral history of West Bengal, the BJP has come to power while Tamil Nadu witnessed the rise of a new party TVK under the leadership of filmstar Joseph Vijay Chandrasekhar ending the alternating political domination of the DMK and AIADMK over the last six decades.
It must be noted that the results have come in the wake of mass exclusion of voters to the tune of more than nine million in West Bengal and more than seven million in Tamil Nadu and extremely bizarre delimitation of constituencies in Assam. Extra filters were added in the West Bengal SIR process in the name of 'logical discrepancy' and more than three million voters were deprived in the process of their voting right. On top of this electoral purge, the elections were conducted in the shadow of massive central intervention and unprecedented induction of paramilitary forces.
It is this calculated act of electoral subversion, and the mobilisation of considerable sections of the electorate on communal lines using the bogey of infiltration from Bangladesh, and other Islamophobic myths, which, coupled with the accumulated anger of the people against the misrule of the TMC, has resulted in the BJP's unexpected scale of victory in West Bengal.
An emboldened BJP will try to use the poll outcome to further its sinister political agenda of complete capture and centralisation of power, further disenfranchisement and ethnic cleansing, and silencing of people's protests through heightened repression and political witch hunt. Left and progressive forces must close ranks and stand with the people to resist this fascist design.
-- Central Committee, CPI(ML) Liberation
