The BJP today dedicated its West Bengal election win to Jana Sangh founder Syama Prasad Mookerjee, the Bengal-born former Congressman who quit the Jawaharlal Nehru Cabinet to set up the BJP’s precursor outfit in 1951.For years after Mookerjee, several BJP stalwarts struggled for a foothold in the eastern state, but Bengal never let the saffron forces in. So much so that late Atal Behari Vajpayee once cited the inability to expand the BJP base in Bengal as one of his regrets.Until the 2009 Lok Sabha elections, the BJP was not even a fringe player in the state. It had no seat and around a 4 per cent vote share.Then came Narendra Modi, under whose leadership of the BJP in the 2014 Lok Sabha elections, the party won two Lok Sabha seats in the state and a 17 per cent vote share. The electoral fortunes of saffron force dwindled in the state, but there was a clear plan in place which was executed from 2014 to 2026, yielding in today’s phenomenal result.The Modi-led plan was to ensure a saffron win in Bengal for two main reasons. First, its ideological importance to the BJP’s scheme of things. Bengal is home to Jana Sangh founder Mookerjee, Sri Aurobindo, Swami Vivekananda, Bankim Chandra Chattopadhyay, Netaji Subhas Chandra Bose, Rabindranath Tagore and several other leading lights of the Indian nationalist and cultural movements. Two, the strategic location of Bengal and the imperative of securing its borders. West Bengal has the longest international border among all Indian states, spanning approximately 2,217 km with Bangladesh.Modi assigned the task of winning Bengal to Home Minister Amit Shah and BJP general secretary in-charge of the state Jattvibeil Bansal.The teams — up against Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee’s personal appeal and the TMC’s immense organisational depth — set about the task of creating booths at almost each of 80,719 polling stations to ensure mobilisation of voters. The RSS’ ground outreach aided the party efforts. Result was the BJP got 10 per cent votes in the 2016 Assembly polls and finally 18 Lok Sabha seats in 2019, managing a 40 per cent vote share.Sources said once 40 per cent vote share was reached, the party needed just a 6 per cent additional swing to turn the election.Here came the concerted anti-infiltration rhetoric, coupled with the pro-CAA pitch for Hindus who came from Bangladesh, the promise of the UCC within six months if elected and a guarantee of free and fair election by placing a record 2.4 lakh personnel of central forces on the ground. The co-option of Mamata’s aide Suvendu Adhikari, who defeated her in 2021 and today also, was also part of the BJP’s broad strategy — which may well end with naming Adhikari the party’s CM.Adhikari, a former TMC insider, came in handy while the BJP and the RSS did the rest.A party leader today said, “Historic 90 per cent plus voter turnout was not a coincidence. It was the result of meticulous efforts and planning.”The party’s anti-corruption, anti-syndicate rule, pro-women and anti-infiltration pitches also resonated deeply with voters, leading to Hindu and women consolidation behind Modi and significant pocketing of the tribal vote.PM Modi personally held 19 rallies in the state. Shah was stationed in Kolkata to give people an assurance of law and order in case they came out to vote. The party engaged all sections of voters, including Bengal’s famed football club lovers. Some 80,000 footballs were distributed free and the Narendra Modi Cup contest was held in which 18,000 participated and the prize money was Rs 1 lakh.To counter Mamata’s welfare pitch, the BJP promised larger financial sops. The special intensive revision of the voter list remained the wild card that cleaned up the rolls, with major deletions in Muslim-dominated belts. ED action against TMC support system leaders also lent the BJP some natural edge in the fight, as did the PM’s offensive against the TMC for stalling the 33 per cent women’s quota Bill in the Lok Sabha.Add to that the PM’s personal appeal to the voters of Bengal through his “jhalmuri”, Ganges cruise along the Howrah and Kalibari temple visits besides several rallies which ensured the BJP retained north Bengal bastions and breached Mamata’s south Bengal strongholds.Many BJP leaders, including Anurag Thakur, were even captured on videos relishing fish delicacies. From the mundane to the specifics, the BJP deployed all it had to wrest Bengal from Mamata and take the fight to the finish.Almost every leader who matters in the party had one thing to say in the run-up to the elections: “It is now or never for us.”