Mamata Banerjee Refuses to Resign Because “We Have Not Lost”; India Condemns Drone Attacks in UAE But Does Not Name Iran; Bengal Was the First Breeding Ground of Hindu Nationalism
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Snapshot of the day
May 5, 2026
Sidharth Bhatia
All India Trinamool Congress chief Mamata Banerjee will not tender her resignation as chief minister of West Bengal to the governor because “we did not lose the elections”. “They have forcefully captured the state. The real villain is the Election Commission,” she said at her first press conference after the counting of votes revealed that the BJP had won over two-thirds of the state’s seats, capping off her 15-year-long consecutive rule. So what happens now? Speaking to The Hindu, former bureaucrat Jawhar Sircar noted that since Banerjee and her government’s tenure will expire on Thursday, her refusal to resign will only be symbolic. “It is like sitting there with expired medicine. What will she do with it even if she does not resign,” he said. Meanwhile, Pinarayi Vijayan and M.K. Stalin, the other CMs who were ousted in the elections, have tendered their resignations to the Lok Bhavans in Chennai and Thiruvananthapuram, and the EC has sent notifications constituting new assemblies in Assam, Kerala, Puducherry, Tamil Nadu and Bengal to the respective governors.
For the time being, said Banerjee on Tuesday, “now my target is clear … I had made it clear what I will do with other INDIA bloc leaders. I will strengthen the INDIA bloc”. Asked if she would attempt to re-enter the assembly – she stands defeated in her own backyard of Bhabanipur, by the BJP’s Suvendu Adhikari – she indicated she would not.
Meanwhile, BJP’s victory celebrations in the state have turned into a state of vandalism.
Still, the question of what impact the EC’s very contentious special intensive revision had on the results in Bengal will likely linger for a while. Some have taken a crack at answering that question: the Hindustan Times‘s Abhishek Jha and Roshan Kishore argue that the SIR probably did not propel the BJP to the finish line. Excluding the 100 seats that either the TMC and its allies or the BJP have won in three consecutive elections, they find that there is “next to no correlation” between the proportion of names deleted from the rolls and the change in their vote shares.
But neither correlations nor identity matching are definitive, the journalist Abir Dasgupta argues. “The numbers could still be a coincidence, in theory,” he says, providing an example. “The answer is fundamentally unknowable for the public with secret ballots.” On a broader level, political scientist Gilles Verniers writes that the very fact there is ambiguity over whether the outcome would have been different had the SIR not been conducted or held in a different way, is a worrying thing. “One cannot know what the results would have been without [the] EC’s interference. Legitimacy rests not on results, but on the integrity of the process … Until there is a full, independent accounting of how [the] SIR was conducted, these results will carry an asterisk that no victory speech can remove,” he has pointed out. Of the nearly 89 lakh names excised from Bengal’s rolls, some 27 lakh people flagged for ‘logical discrepancies’ were left out for want of time.
The reality is so stark to ignore that even Gaudam Adani-owned NDTV has reported that SIR-related deletions may have favoured BJP in West Bengal.
And the numbers only deepen the indictment – Bengal’s so-called 5% edge has exploded into a staggering 125-seat blow to Banerjee, reports Madhuparna Das, detailing how a relatively narrow vote-share difference has translated into a significantly larger seat differential.
Above all, the ground reality – and the new normal – in a new low, is indeed changing:
In other news, the Enforcement Directorate has
