There is something deeply comforting about the human capacity for self-delusion. It is one of the few natural resources that is genuinely renewable, requires no mining, and produces no waste except democracy. Donald Trump discovered this in November 2020. Mamata Banerjee has rediscovered it in May 2026. The choreography is identical.
Trump, you will recall, watched the numbers come in on the night of November 3, 2020. They were not coming in favourably. By the time Arizona fell and Pennsylvania wobbled, the arithmetic was doing what arithmetic insists on doing: reflecting the reality, regardless of who is watching. This is arithmetic’s most infuriating quality.
Trump’s response was to declare victory at 2 am, denounce the count, and spend the next 63 days building an elaborate cathedral of conspiracy in which he was the robbed sovereign and 77 million Americans were either fraudsters or fools. He held rallies. He filed lawsuits. He lost the lawsuits. He held more rallies. He pressured the Vice President. He called the Georgia Secretary of State and requested, with remarkable specificity, that 11,780 votes be found. None were found. Not one.
On January 6, 2021, he gave a speech urging the crowd to “fight like hell” against a stolen election and march to the Capitol, where Congress was preparing to certify the electoral college vote. The crowd obliged. They forced their way in, fighting Capitol Police, destroying property. Pipe bombs were found at the Democratic National Committee and Republican National Committee headquarters. About 140 officers were injured. The Capitol, that grand old building that had survived the British in 1814, nearly did not survive its own citizens in 2021.
History is frequently funnier than historians like to admit. Now cross seven oceans and a few time zones.
West Bengal. May 4, 2026. The BJP swept the polls in its first-ever victory in Bengal, winning 206 of the 294 assembly seats. The Trinamool Congress, which had lorded over Bengal since 2011, was reduced to rubble. Mamata Banerjee, Chief Minister, Didi, the woman who had made herself synonymous with Bengal itself, lost her own seat. Banerjee refused to concede, alleging election chori. “I will not resign, I did not lose,” she said, claiming over 100 seats were “forcibly taken” with the help of a “biased” Election Commission.
One hundred seats. Forcibly taken. By the Election Commission. Of India.
This is a remarkable claim. The Election Commission has historically been accused of many things: tardiness, favouritism, the odd scheduling that works conveniently for the BJP, but running a covert paramilitary operation to manually manipulate 100 constituencies will be a feat few expect.
Everyone knows why Bengal required such heavy central force deployment. If you were living in Europe, read up on the 2021 election aftermath. Mamata has always been ambitious. It appears she has now extended that ambition to her accusations as well.
The symmetry with Trump is not accidental. Both leaders had built their political identity around the idea that they were the authentic voice of the people. Rebels. Both had spent years as outsiders, scrapping against the establishment, accumulating a loyalty that was personal rather than institutional. Both, when the people spoke decisively against them, concluded that the people must have been confused. Or coerced. Or both. The people, in this reading, are always sovereign, right up until they vote the wrong way.
Trump declared he would “never concede” from behind a bulletproof shield, criticising the media and calling for Mike Pence to overturn the results. Mamata held a press conference and told journalists she had not lost. These are functionally the same statement. The bulletproof shield is optional. The refusal to engage with reality is mandatory.
What followed in Bengal was predictable, unlike what happened in Washington in January 2021, which surprised at least some people who had not been paying attention. Post-election violence erupted across West Bengal with reports of killings, arson and clashes between party workers. At least four people were killed in unrest since the results were announced, with incidents of arson, vandalism and targeted attacks across multiple districts. Clashes and political confrontations surfaced across Kolkata, Howrah, Birbhum, Murshidabad, North 24 Parganas, South 24 Parganas and other districts. A police officer was shot in Nyajat. TMC offices were torched in Jamuria. Bulldozers demolished structures in Kolkata’s New Market. BJP leader Suvendu Adhikari’s closest aide was shot dead just outside the metropolis. The scale differs from January 6. The logic is the same.
When a leader tells their followers that the result was stolen, they are not making a factual claim. They are issuing an instruction. The instruction says: do not accept this. The instruction says: the streets are the real court. The instruction says: your anger is legitimate because my loss is impossible.
In Washington, 120 of those charged for crimes on January 6 specifically cited Trump’s remarks as the reason they went to the Capitol. They were not wrong to cite him. They had been told, repeatedly, in language both poetic and explicit, that fighting was required. They fought.
In Bengal, cadres who were already deserting found in Mamata’s press conference a reason to pause. The quiet migration of the politically abandoned had already begun, many quietly eyeing a new patron in the BJP, when they heard the call to pick up whatever was at hand and prove their loyalty in the only currency that remained available to them.
This is the mechanism. This is how it works, every time, in every language, on every continent where a leader refuses to lose.
There are differences, of course. Trump had Twitter, Fox News, and a MAGA infrastructure of grievance that stretched from prime-time television to the darkest corners of the internet. Mamata has her cadres and a ferocity of personality that has never needed infrastructure, only an audience and a grievance. Trump’s fraud claims were rejected by court after court after court. Mamata’s claims are yet to find a court patient enough to hear them.
Trump eventually, reluctantly, conceded to an orderly transition of power in a televised statement, pressured by his Cabinet and the public outrage against him, and presumably by the dawning realisation that the National Guard was not going to march for him regardless of how many hints he dropped. Mamata shows no such pressure. She has found support from fellow INDIA Alliance travellers, which is to say, from people who also lost badly and would like company. She now waits for the world to catch up with her version of events.
The world, as usual, is in no hurry.
There is also this: in 2021, the mob that stormed the Capitol was trying to stop a democratic process. In 2026, the violence in Bengal aims at stopping a ceremonial process to mark the conclusion of a democratic process. One attacked democracy at the door. The other is attacking it in the driveway. The car has already left.
Democracy is a strange and demanding system. It asks of its participants something that is, on reflection, genuinely difficult. The willingness to lose. To accept that a free and fair election, however imperfect the system, however fallible the voters, is the mechanism by which power is transferred and legitimacy is conferred. Most politicians understand this. Stalin understood this. They accept it. They go home, regroup, and come back after five years, slightly humbler and considerably better at retail politics.
Some do not. Some decide that the election was wrong, the commission was biased, and that their loss is, in the deepest sense, a crime against the natural order of things. They say so, loudly, to large crowds who are already disappointed, already angry, already looking for someone to blame.
The results may have been difficult to predict, but the result of the results was predictable. In Bengal, they have always been entirely predictable. What is remarkable is that the companies of central forces have remained mute spectators. Weren’t they supposed to stay on for an extended period to prevent exactly this? The forces were deployed to ensure a free and fair vote. Apparently, nobody thought the boots on the ground could also ensure a free and fair aftermath. And bloody to boot.
(Views expressed in the piece are those of the author)
