The historic victory of the Bhartiya Janata Party in West Bengal has given heartburn not just to the Trinamool Congress and its supporters but to the entire Islamo-leftist cabal globally. Several foreign media publications covered the BJP’s thumping victory, though not without peddling propaganda about the victorious party’s ‘Hindu nationalist’ ideology, ‘Muslim minority under threat’ bogey and falsehoods about the pre-poll SIR exercise.
The New York Times frames the BJP’s Bengal ‘conquest’ as an expansion of Hindu nationalism
The New York Times, a US-based newspaper with a track record of pushing anti-India and anti-Hindu narratives through Indian brown sepoys, covered the BJP’s 206 out of 294-seat victory on 4th May. The Islamo-leftist newspaper, however, could not hold back its anguish over the “conquest” of West Bengal by “Modi’s Hindu Nationalists”.
In an article headlined, “Modi’s Hindu Nationalists Conquer a Bastion of India’s Opposition”, the NYT described the BJP’s victory in Bengal as a big boost to Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s supposed expansionist “Hindu-first” politics.
Predictably, the newspaper amplified the opposition’s falsehoods around the Special Intensive Revision (SIR) of electoral rolls in West Bengal. It claimed that the SIR struck nine million voter names out of the electoral roll with “many of them Muslim”. The NYT not only framed the SIR as some sort of anti-Muslim electoral engineering in the BJP’s favour but also cast aspersions on the integrity of Chief Election Commissioner Gyanesh Kumar.
Without offering a shred of evidence but the opposition’s baseless rhetoric, the New York Times claimed that CEC Kumar has ‘close ties’ to PM Modi.
“Nine million names, many of them Muslim, were struck from the voter rolls in an audit by the Election Commission ahead of the election…. The Election Commission had rejected earlier versions of similar complaints. The commission, a formally independent body, is currently led by an official with close ties to Mr Modi,” the NYT piece reads.
It is essential to note that, contrary to the NYT’s framing that the ECI conducted SIR in Bengal right ahead of the elections, the ECI deleted 58.25 lakh voters who were found to be deceased, absent, shifted, or had duplicate entries in the draft rolls in December 2025. This slashed the total voter base down from 7.66 crore to 7.04 crore. Subsequently, an additional 5 lakh names were removed from the final rolls on 28th February, taking the overall number of deletions to just under 91 lakhs.
Of 60.06 lakh voters who were initially put under adjudication, nearly half were found ineligible. The highest number of deletions was recorded in Muslim-dominated Murshidabad, where more than 4.55 lakh voters were found ineligible out of 11 lakhs marked for adjudication. Murshidabad district shares a border with Bangladesh. Muslim mob violence and Bangladeshi Muslim infiltration are major issues here.
Contrary to the propaganda peddled by anti-BJP parties, their ideological allies in India and abroad, the official ECI breakdown demonstrated that the vast majority were standard clean-up categories like dead, absent, permanently shifted, untraceable at registered addresses, or bogus.
Pertinently, while the Indian and foreign Islamo-leftist media coterie has been framing the SIR exercise as a conspiracy by ECI and BJP to disenfranchise Muslims, it is Hindus who comprised 63% of the deletions in absolute terms.
Furthermore, the NYT attempted to contrast how PM Modi comes from the ideological background that defines India as a Hindu nation and loathes the presence of Islam, while the Bengali people uphold ‘secularism’ and intellectual superiority.
“Mr Modi’s B.J.P., by contrast, descends from a school of thinking that defines India as a Hindu nation and abhors the thousand-year presence of Islam,” the article claims.
The subtlety of this apocryphal framing is amusing. Quite conveniently, the New York Times painted Narendra Modi as ‘anti-secularist’ and what the Islamo-leftist cabal describes as ‘Islamophobe’. India is a Hindu nation. This is a civilisational reality, and Indians don’t need to subscribe to the BJP’s political ideology to acknowledge this fact. Moreover, the BJP or its ‘Hindu nationalist’ ideology does not abhor the ‘thousand-year presence of Islam’; it only abhors the glorification of Islamic barbarians and invaders, who brutalised, killed, converted Hindus and non-Muslims to Islam and destroyed Hindu temples.
It is interesting how the NYT and similar Islamo-leftist propaganda outlets frame ‘Hindu nationalists’ as bigots but never highlight the hatred for idolaters like Hindus mandated by Islamic texts.
Moving ahead, the NYT framed Mamata Banerjee as a champion of the poor and downtrodden who resisted “corporate interests while heralding welfare schemes and playing up her credentials as a secularist, which made her especially popular among Muslims and liberals.”
Contrary to the NYT’s framing, Mamata Banerjee is neither a secularist nor a leader who boosted Bengal’s economic growth through welfare schemes. In her 15-year rule, Banerjee pushed an industrial powerhouse of Bengal into the quagmire of a debt trap. Under the TMC regime, West Bengal’s share in national GDP dwindled, per capita income slumped below the national average, and thousands of companies have moved out of the state.
Indeed, Banerjee ran many populist welfare schemes; however, these resulted in Bengal’s entanglement in a cycle of borrowing to pay for day-to-day expenses rather than building assets that could generate future income, taking its debt to over ₹7.7 lakh crore. The TMC regime ruined Bengal’s industrial environment with its “syndicate raj” to such an extent that since 2011, more than 6,600 companies, including 110 listed firms, have moved their registered offices out of West Bengal.
OpIndia has documented numerous incidents wherein Mamata Banerjee demonstrated blatant neglect, rather, humiliating suppression of Hindus, while going out of the way to appease Muslims. It was reported in 2023 that a Durga Mandir was found blocked and barricaded in Kaliachak town in Malda district of West Bengal. The development came a day before the Islamic month of Muharram. Before this, CM Mamata Banerjee imposed restrictions on the immersion of Durga idols in 2016 and 2017 to make way for Muharram processions.
In fact, Banerjee took pride in not being a Kafir and fighting Kafirs (infidels as per Islam). But since Banerjee appeased Muslims and suppressed Hindus, she and her party remained ‘secular’ and ‘liberal’ in the eyes of liberals.
The Bengali Hindus, who trusted and voted for the TMC, have had enough of the party’s oppression and misrule and decided to give the BJP the long-awaited claim to power. This is how democracies function. But the New York Times cannot fathom that the so-called Hindu nationalist party has swayed Bengali voters with its issues-based grassroots-level poll campaign.
Reuters reduces the BJP’s poll successes in Bengal and Assam as a result of appealing to the Hindu majority
The foreign legacy media has this habit of describing the BJP as a ‘Hindu nationalist’ party, ‘Hindu hardliner’, ‘Hindutva outfit’ and whatnot, essentially to instil readers with the idea that it is a religious bigot, and fringe that has gained prominence and power by walking a linear path of aggressively appealing to India’s Hindu majority. In this vein, a Reuters report claimed that PM Modi’s supposed strategy of appealing to the country’s Hindu majority has become a sure-fire winner.”
“The gains also underline that Modi’s strategy of pushing economic development, giving generous handouts and appealing to the country’s Hindu majority has become a sure-fire winner, including in regions long seen as opposition strongholds,” the report reads.
Ironically, the BJP is abhorred by Islamo-leftists for supposedly being opposed to ‘secularism’, but when the same party wants to implement a secular Uniform Civil Code, somehow the same anti-Hindu cabal advocates communal narratives.
Interestingly, much like Reuters, almost all foreign legacy media outlets covering Bengal elections quoted Rahul Verma, a fellow at the anti-India propaganda factory, Centre for Policy Research, which is run by the daughter of Congress leader Mani Shankar Aiyar. It has been under scrutiny for non-compliance with the Foreign Contribution Regulation Act (FCRA) rules.
The Guardian fails to hide frustration over the ‘Hindu Nationalist’ BJP’s Bengal and Assam victories
From the 2020 Delhi Riots to the 2022 Leicester violence coverage, the UK-based newspaper, The Guardian, has been infamous for its blatant anti-Hindu and pro-Jihadist bias. In continuation of the same trait, The Guardian deployed Hannah Ellis-Petersen to recycle the same old ‘Hindu nationalism’, ‘minorities oppressed’ and ‘secularism in danger’ bogey as the BJP registered maiden victory in Bengal and retained Assam.
“Over the past 15 years, the state has been ruled by Trinamool Congress (TMC), a key opposition party, under the leadership of Mamata Banerjee, the state’s female chief minister. Banerjee had been one of the most outspoken critics of Modi and his religious nationalist agenda over his 12 years in power,” The Guardian article says.
The Guardian also amplified the already debunked lies regarding the SIR and its supposed targeted impact on Muslims.
“The result followed a highly controversial exercise by the BJP government to revise West Bengal’s electoral roll, under the guise of ‘purging’ it of illegal voters. As a result of the project, called a special intensive revision (SIR), more than 2.7 million voters were removed from the vote register. Analysis showed that Muslims and other minorities – who traditionally do not support the BJP – were disproportionately targeted,” the report reads.
Contrary to the narrative pushed by The Guardian, the 2.7 million or the 27,16,393 voters, to be precise, were not arbitrarily removed. These were flagged for discrepancies and reviewed by around 705 judicial officers under the Calcutta High Court monitoring, as well as Supreme Court oversight. Of the 60.06 lakh cases, 32.68 lakh were retained as eligible, while 27.16 lakh were ruled excludable.
The Guardian claimed that the SIR in Bengal “disproportionately targeted Muslims”; however, 3% of the deletions in absolute terms involved Hindus. Even some Hindu-dominated areas like Paschim Bardhaman and the Matua community pockets in North 24-Parganas witnessed significant deletions. It was the Supreme Court’s decision that people whose cases are still pending cannot be allowed to vote in the elections. Apparently, the foreign media would update its reportage as soon as the opposition updates its rhetoric from “ECI is compromised” to “ECI and the Supreme Court both are compromised”.
Al Jazeera credits the BJP’s victory to ‘religious polarisation’, fails to highlight the TMC’s Muslim appeasement
Al Jazeera, the Qatar-based Islamic Jihadist propaganda outlet, which has consistently been pushing anti-Hindu narratives, attributed the BJP’s Bengal victory to its strategy of ‘religious polarisation’.
Citing a Bengali Hindu voter’s statement, “Didi has lost the track and only appeases Muslims to stay in power”, Al Jazeera claimed: “That’s an accusation that Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s Hindu majoritarian Bharatiya Janata Party has long levelled against the TMC, which emphasises religious pluralism and the protection of minority rights.”
“Yet it is the outcome in West Bengal that analysts say is by far the most consequential of the results that were declared on Monday, with the BJP walking the trails of religious polarisation and leveraging underlying anti-incumbency to win…” it added.
Much like The New York Times, Al Jazeera also whitewashed Mamata Banerjee’s anti-industrial growth policies as some sort of ‘push back’ against corporate interests.
Unsurprisingly, Al Jazeera also amplified the disinformation peddled by the opposition parties and Islamists online regarding the imaginary ‘anti-Muslim’ nature of the Special Intensive Revision.
Rejected by Indian voters, opposition finds takers in Pakistan: Pakistani media amplifies Rahul Gandhi-Mamta Banerjee’s ‘election rigging’ propaganda
From Pakistani ISPR bots pushing propaganda in favour of Congress leader Rahul Gandhi, former minister Fawad Chaudhary supporting Gandhi over his haranguing regarding Ayodhya Ram Mandir Pran Pratishtha, receiving media support for echoing Pakistan’s falsehoods during Operation Sindoor, the Gandhi scion enjoys more support from the hostile neighbour than his home country, India.
In a fresh demonstration of this limerence, Pakistani media has amplified Gandhi’s ‘election rigging’ and ‘ECI is compromised’ bogey. ARY Digital, a leading Pakistani Islamist propaganda outlet, published a report headlined, “Rahul Gandhi, Mamata Banerjee accuse BJP of rigging Indian state elections.”
This article, published on 5th May, amplified the claims by Rahul Gandhi and Mamata Banerjee that more than 100 seats were “stolen” by the BJP through the Election Commission.
On 4th May, Geo News, Dawn and other major Pakistani news outlets ran wire stories by the AFP about the recently-concluded multi-state elections. The wire report amplified the usual lies about the SIR and the imaginary targeted disenfranchisement of Muslims in Bengal.
