After Bengal, is Kolkata Municipal Corporation set to turn saffron?

After the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) swept West Bengal in the 2026 Assembly elections, decimating the Trinamool Congress (TMC), the question which is doing the rounds is whether the Kolkata Municipal Corporation (KMC) will also turn saffron next.

The KMC has remained a TMC fortress all these years, as is Kolkata. However, the 2026 poll saw cracks in that bastion as Mamata Banerjee’s party won only five out of 11 Assembly seats in the state capital. The remaining went to the BJP.

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There are 16 Assembly constituencies under three Lok Sabha centres under the jurisdiction of the KMC. The BJP has won 11 out of them. And in terms of the civic wards, the BJP is leading in 101 out of 144, a report by Bengali daily Anandabazar Patrika reported. The TMC is leading in only 43, the report added.

According to observers, it could be a matter of time that the lotus blooms in the KMC as the next elections are due in December and the TMC might not have adequate time to tighten things after the devastation it just faced.

TMC won 134 out of 144 KMC wards in 2021

While the BJP has not said anything about the KMC or adjacent civic bodies, as the focus is more on the swearing-in of the new government on Saturday (May 9), sources in the TMC have expressed apprehension that elections to those bodies might even happen before the scheduled time, and it could be challenging for the local outfit to retain the KMC. In the 2021 elections, the TMC pocketed 134 of the KMC’s 144 wards, while the BJP got only three.

The TMC won the KMC two times, even when the Left was in power. After the historic change in 2011, the party has dominated the civic body without interruption. It was often alleged that the party followed electoral malpractices with the help of the police to keep the civic body’s control. But with the power gone, it might be challenging for the TMC to maintain the same dominance, barring areas such as Kasba, Tiljala, Khidirpore and others that have a sizeable minority population.

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The Bengali report cited one civic official as saying that despite the party councillors putting in a lot of hard work, the anti-incumbency might be too big for the TMC to beat in the KMC elections.

Even in areas adjacent to Kolkata that fall under civic authorities, the TMC is apprehensive. In places such as Howrah, Bidhannagar and Bali that are not far from Kolkata, the BJP has uprooted the TMC. It is afraid that the upcoming elections in those civic bodies would be equally tough.

Saffron wave swept BMC, TC

If the BJP wins control of the KMC, it would not be the first major city in the country to see such an outcome. Last year, the saffron party-led National Democratic Alliance wrested the Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation, the richest civic body of the country, from the undivided Shiv Sena/Shiv Sena (Uddhav Thackeray) faction after a gap of three decades.

Also read: What explains Bengal’s saffron shift? 6 reasons why Mamata was decimated

It came after the saffron wave swept Maharashtra in 2024.

In Thiruvananthapuram, Kerala, too, the BJP stormed the city's civic citadel (Thiruvananthapuram Corporation) during the local self-government elections last December, ending four decades of uninterrupted rule by the Left.