Kolkata/New Delhi: Suvendu Adhikari’s rise to the chief ministership of West Bengal is not the story of a clean political outsider sweeping away a corrupt old order. Adhikari is a hard-edged insider who mastered Bengal’s violent, factional, patronage-driven politics, switched camps at a decisive moment, and then repackaged himself as the Bharatiya Janata Party’s most aggressive Hindutva face in the state.On May 9, 2026, Adhikari took oath as West Bengal’s first BJP chief minister, after the BJP won 207 seats in the assembly election and ended Mamata Banerjee’s 15-year rule. His victory over Banerjee completed a remarkable personal arc. The Election Commission result page for Bhabanipur showed Adhikari defeating his once political guru by 73,917 votes to 58,812, a margin of 15,105 votes.But the victory also brings to Writers’ Building a figure whose career is inseparable from controversy. Yet the symbolism of that victory should not obscure the nature of the man now in power. Adhikari’s career has been shaped by organisational brilliance, opportunism, controversy, allegations of corruption, communal polarisation and a striking comfort with confrontation. He is no accidental chief minister but the product of Bengal’s hardest forms of power politics.A dynasty in Purba MedinipurAdhikari’s roots lie in his family’s long dominance over Purba Medinipur. The family’s influence over the Kanthi and Tamluk belts gave him a readymade political infrastructure. His father Sisir Adhikari was an old-guard Congress leader whose long municipal and parliamentary career created a network of local patronage, cooperative influence and administrative access that helped his son, Suvendu, enter politics as an heir to a functioning regional machine. That inheritance, however, does not fully explain his rise. Adhikari’s political brand was born in Nandigram. In 2007, when the Left Front government’s land-acquisition push triggered a mass uprising, he emerged as one of the principal ground organisers of the anti-acquisition movement. That movement helped Mamata Banerjee dismantle the Left’s 34-year rule, but it also gave Adhikari a separate political legitimacy. No longer just Sisir’s son, he was now a tactical man in the field, mobilising village networks, coordinating resistance and helping turn agrarian anger into an anti-Left political force.Nandigram and the politics of forceBut Nandigram also supplied the first dark layer of his public persona. The same movement that made him a mass leader also associated him with a politics of force. West Bengal CID had claimed in 2010 that Adhikari supplied arms and ammunition to Maoists during the Nandigram violence. These remain allegations, not convictions, but politically they have long fed the perception of Adhikari as a ruthless organiser who treats power as something to be seized, defended and expanded through pressure.Inside the TMC, Adhikari functioned as a regional satrap with his own cadre base, his own electoral geography and his own sense of political entitlement. He served as transport minister and irrigation minister, portfolios that placed him close to infrastructure, unions, logistics and the agrarian districts that formed his base. A defection built on ambitionHis rupture with the TMC was not a simple ideological journey from one worldview to another. It was also a struggle over ambition, succession and control. As Mamata Banerjee’s nephew Abhishek rose within the TMC, leaders like Adhikari saw their future narrowed inside a party increasingly organised around the Banerjee family. Adhikari viewed himself as a co-architect of the TMC’s rise, not as a subordinate awaiting instruction from a dynastic successor.Adhikari’s defection to the BJP in 2020 gave the party something it had lacked in Bengal – a battle-tested Bengali organiser with intimate knowledge of the TMC’s booth machinery. That transaction came with an ideological makeover for Adhikari who, during his Congress and TMC years, had operated within a broadly secular vocabulary, especially while working in districts with significant Muslim populations, such as Malda and Murshidabad. The Himanta Biswa Sarma template of Hindutva makeoverAfter joining the BJP in December 2020, he embraced a far, far sharper Hindutva idiom. He became one of the party’s most combative voices in Bengal, attacking Mamata Banerjee through communal insinuation, invoking border insecurity, illegal immigration and religious consolidation as central political themes. The BJP’s gamble was clear. Instead of building a state leadership organically, it imported a TMC strongman and gave him a new ideological uniform. In that sense, Adhikari resembles the BJP’s wider “turncoat model” in eastern and north-eastern India – using leaders from non-BJP formations who bring local networks, administrative experience, and a willingness to adopt harder Hindutva messaging. The closest comparison is Himanta Biswa Sarma in Assam. Both men were powerful regional operators inside non-BJP parties before becoming central to the BJP’s expansion. Sarma came from the Congress, Adhikari from the TMC. Both had deep organisational networks, a command over local political machinery, and a grievance against leadership structures that blocked their rise. Once inside the BJP, both became more than defectors. Neither Sarma nor Adhikari represent the old RSS mould of patient ideological cadre building. They represent a more muscular method that is nonetheless associated with the BJP. The party identifies ambitious regional heavyweights from rival formations, absorbs their networks, protects or elevates them, and then uses their administrative experience and local authority to conquer difficult states. This model allows the BJP to overcome its organisational weakness in regions where it historically lacked deep roots.The similarities are not merely organisational. Both leaders also sharpened their ideological vocabulary after entering the BJP. Sarma became one of the BJP’s most aggressive voices on issues of identity, migration and Muslim minority politics in Assam. Adhikari followed a similar path in Bengal, moving from TMC style regional pragmatism to a combative Hindutva language. The leader who once worked inside a coalition dependent on Muslim votes recast himself as a majoritarian tribune. His hate-laced rhetoric around “Begum”, “Mini Pakistan” and Muslim vote consolidation signalled a politics that views Bengal less as a shared civic space than as a battlefield of religious blocs. In the communally charged 2021 assembly election, Adhikari defeated Mamata Banerjee in Nandigram in 2021 by 1,956 votes, becoming the BJP’s most potent anti-Mamata symbol. Opposition as permanent warfareAs Leader of the Opposition between 2021 and 2026, Adhikari sharpened the politics of permanent confrontation. He brought a street fighter style into the assembly, repeatedly clashing with the state government and the Speaker. His tenure saw legislative disruption, suspension, legal battles, and hundreds of criminal cases filed against him by the state police. He also turned courts, communal flashpoints and public confrontation into instruments of political war. His role in pushing for central investigation into the Ram Navami violence showed the same method. He used the judiciary to challenge the state government’s control over law-and-order narratives, securing a major political victory when the probe was transferred to the National Investigation Agency (NIA). Saradha, Narada and selective accountabilityA critical profile of Adhikari cannot ignore the corruption allegations that have followed him across parties.The Saradha case was a major Ponzi scheme that collapsed in April 2013, defrauding over 17 lakh investors of upwards of Rs 2,500 crore.Adhikari was questioned by the CBI, and the owner of the Saradha Group, Sudipto Sen, later accused him of blackmail and extortion. Adhikari has denied the allegations and has not been named in any CBI chargesheet related to the scam. But the allegations remain politically damaging because of the scale of the scam and the fact that it devastated small depositors and exposed the dark nexus between money, media and political patronage in Bengal.The Narada sting operation is even more visually damaging. Footage from the operation allegedly showed Adhikari accepting cash, along with other senior TMC leaders. The subsequent handling of the case deepened the charge of selective accountability. BJP quietly deleted this video in 2020🤣He will become their new CM now 🥳 pic.twitter.com/JDhI9zNsAp— Roshan Rai (@RoshanKrRaii) May 5, 2026A chief minister born out of conflictThe 2026 election completed his transformation from agitator to ruler. His decision to contest both Nandigram and Bhabanipur turned the campaign into a personal duel with Mamata Banerjee. It was a high-risk move designed to demonstrate not merely victory, but domination. The BJP’s landslide gave him the numbers. His defeat of Banerjee gave him the mythology to complete the transition from rebel to ruler. But Bengal’s new chief minister takes office surrounded by the very forces that made him. Political violence, institutional mistrust, communal suspicion and factional revenge are not external problems for Adhikari. They are part of the political soil from which he grew. The killing of his aide Chandranath Rath after the election underlined the volatile atmosphere into which the new government was born. The strongman paradoxThe paradox of Suvendu Adhikari is that he presents himself as a decisive break from the political order that shaped him, while carrying many of the same habits of power that have long defined Bengal’s competitive political culture. He knows patronage because he grew inside it. He knows factionalism because he practised it. He knows coercive mobilisation because his career was forged in its theatre. He attacks corruption while carrying the burden of unresolved scam allegations. He promises order while speaking the language of polarisation.His supporters will call him decisive and rooted in Bengal’s soil. His critics will call him opportunist, communal and toxic. Adhikari is an organiser with deep networks, proven electoral instinct and the ability to convert anger into power. But he is also a leader whose politics has repeatedly blurred the line between mobilisation and intimidation, ideology and communal provocation, corruption and selective accountability.The question now is whether Suvendu Adhikari can govern differently from the way he rose. If he governs as he campaigned, Bengal may see a saffron version of the same strongman state, with sharper communal edges and a more confident majoritarian grammar.