New Delhi: Four days after the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) won the assembly elections in West Bengal, Union home minister Amit Shah announced on Friday (May 5) that Suvendu Adhikari, one-time right-hand man of Trinamool Congress (TMC) supremo Mamata Banerjee, will be the saffron party’s first chief minister in the state.Adhikari, who made news throughout the campaign for his communal speeches, will be sworn in as chief minister along with the new Cabinet at Brigade Parade Ground in Kolkata on Saturday May 9, Rabindranath Tagore’s birth anniversary.Shah too invoked Tagore while addressing the BJP’s legislature party members in Kolkata. He said that the BJP government in the state would make way for people to live with their “minds without fear and head held high” referring to the Nobel Laureate’s famous poem ‘Where the mind is without fear’.Adhikari delivered a double upset to TMC by clinching both Nandigram and Bhabanipur constituencies for the BJP in the recently concluded 2026 assembly election. In Bhabanipur, he defeated former chief minister Banerjee in her stronghold. In the 2021 elections too, Adhikari had defeated Banerjee in Nandigram.“I express gratitude to Amit Shah. With the blessings of the prime minister, I have been elected as the Leader of the Legislature Party. I have received support from all MLAs. There is democracy in the BJP. We will fulfill the commitment of the BJP made during elections for the organisation and the public,” said Adhikari to reporters after his name was announced.Adhikari is the son of Sisir Adhikari, veteran Congress leader and former Union minister of state for rural development under the Manmohan Singh government. Adhikari began his career in the Congress party in 1995, but moved to the TMC along with his father later after the party was formed by Banerjee.Adhikari played a significant role in the 2007 anti-land-acquisition movement that later propelled the TMC to power in 2011, ousting the three decade-old Left government in the state.He ended his over two-decade-long stint at the TMC when he joined the BJP ahead of the elections in 2021 after a falling out with Banerjee.Adhikari’s name was announced by Shah after a meeting of the BJP’s legislature party in Kolkata. Shah, who spearheaded the BJP’s campaign in the state and was made the central observer for the state, said the BJP’s victory in West Bengal is not a victory for the party or the organisation but a matter of national security.“The importance of this victory isn’t limited to the expansion of BJP. It’s also not limited to our ideology’s expansion. The importance of this victory is not that BJP-NDA has won the 21st state. The importance of this victory is that it filled the biggest gap in national security. BJP promised the people of Bengal that we would identify infiltrators and remove them not only from West Bengal but also from the entire country,” he said.While questions have been raised about the manner in which the elections were conducted in West Bengal, under the shadow of the Special Intensive Revision (SIR) of the electoral rolls in the state, Shah said that the saffron party’s victory was “unprecedented.”“Our journey from 3 seats to 77, and now to 207 seats, has been truly unprecedented. Out of 23 administrative districts, there are nine where Didi (Banerjee) has not even managed to open an account – she has been completely wiped out. I have never witnessed such an overwhelming mandate,” he said.The contentious SIR in West Bengal saw the electorate shrink by about 90 lakh and 27 lakh voters were left to wait for their fate to be decided by 19 judicial tribunals less than two weeks before polls.The Wire has reported that numbers reveal that the BJP’s victory was built on four major pillars: consolidation of Scheduled Caste votes, the dominance of Schedule Tribe support, urban and mixed-seat expansion, and district-level sweeps in key regions. However, the data also shows that in 150 seats – more than half of West Bengal’s 294 – total SIR deletions were greater than victory margins. Of these, BJP won 99, while in 2021, it had won just 19.Shah accused leader of opposition Rahul Gandhi of undermining the electoral process due to the Congress’ inability to win elections.“Congress has struggled to win elections in many regions for several years. Now that they recognise that electoral victory is increasingly unattainable, they have shifted their focus to undermining the credibility of the electoral process itself,” he said.“This is why prominent Congress leader Rahul Gandhi has repeatedly raised concerns about the integrity of EVMs, the voter list, and the SIR.”This is a breaking news copy and will be updated.