High Risk, Highest Return: How BJP's 3-Leader IPO Delivered 3 Chief Ministers

That is Himanta Biswa Sarma – the current Chief Minister of Assam, the BJP's de facto overlord of the entire Northeast, and the single most consequential political figure that Rahul Gandhi’s Congress created. The biscuit story is not hypothetical. Sarma recounted it himself on X (formerly Twitter) in 2024, with the kind of clarity that only a man who has been properly savaged – and subsequently triumphant – could muster. It wasn't just Sarma, but a similar treatment was meted out to Mamata Banerjee’s loyalist Suvendu Adhikari, who has now won Bengal for her arch rivals – the Bharatiya Janata Party. Shift to the southern side and there’s Puducherry, yet another Congress mistake. N Rangasamy - four consecutive terms as an MLA, two stints as chief minister, and a track record of genuine administrative delivery. Then an internal revolt engineered by rivals followed by a forced resignation in 2008 and the usual silence from “high command”.

The three stories tell you one thing about how BJP’s most powerful regional expansion of the last decade actually happened: not only through ideology, not only through organisation, but primarily through the opposition’s missed opportunity in not valuing its own best people. The BJP invested in these leaders when their market value was not-so-high and is now reaping profit + dividend.

This story begins around 2014-2015, when Himanta Biswa Sarma, who had single-handedly managed Congress campaigns to back-to-back Assam victories, delivering 79 seats in 2011 alone, asked his party’s “high command" for what he had arguably earned: the chief ministership. Then Assam CM Tarun Gogoi had other plans. His son Gaurav, freshly entered into active politics, was the chosen future. Sarma, who reportedly had the backing of 54 of the party’s 78 MLAs, travelled to Delhi to present his case to Rahul Gandhi. The meeting ended with an offered biscuit and a suggestion to step aside. He did step out, but not within the party but outside the Congress, and never looked back. At least so far, he hasn’t.

Then there is N. Rangasamy of Puducherry — a quieter story, but the geometry is identical. Four consecutive terms as an MLA, two stints as CM, a track record of genuine administrative delivery. Then internal revolt engineered by rivals, a forced resignation in 2008, and the usual Delhi silence. He quit the Congress in January 2011, formed the All India NR Congress, and took it into the NDA by 2014. In 2021, the AINRC-BJP alliance won a clear majority in the 30-member assembly — the first NDA government Puducherry had ever seen. In 2026, Rangasamy continued his victory march. The Congress, which chose not to keep him, is scratching around for seats it once held comfortably.

In West Bengal, it is Suvendu Adhikari, where the script turned from political drama into something close to Greek tragedy, if the tragedy starred Mamata Banerjee and the protagonist had considerably better ground intelligence. Adhikari was not merely a Trinamool loyalist. He was the man who organised the Nandigram agitation in 2007 — the very movement that broke the Left’s 34-year stranglehold and propelled Mamata Banerjee to power. He built Trinamool’s entire rural architecture in Purba Medinipur. He won multiple elections, held multiple portfolios, delivered the grassroots access that no amount of urban charisma can manufacture. When the party’s inner circle decided his influence had grown inconveniently large, it moved to clip it. He resigned as transport minister in November 2020 and joined the BJP in December of that year in the presence of Amit Shah.

Five months later, he stood against Mamata Banerjee in Nandigram, her home turf, her origin myth, the constituency that made her, and defeated her by 1,956 votes. It was not merely an electoral result. It was, for anyone watching, a very public answer to the question of what happens when you sideline the person who built the machine.

And on May 4, 2026: Suvendhu Adhikari defeated Mamata Banerjee, this time in her seat, Bhabhanipur, by 15000 votes. The margin of her ‘error’ only widened. The BJP, with Adhikari as its face in the state, uprooted the TMC government after 15 years of undisputed rule in West Bengal.

Three states. Three leaders pushed to the exit by the opposition parties. Three men who arrived at the BJP not as converts but as instruments already sharpened by someone else — carrying networks, credibility, and a grievance steady enough to last years of hard work. The BJP’s role in each case was not recruitment genius. It was simply the willingness to do what the Congress and the TMC would not: treat a useful man as if he mattered.

The Congress and TMC called each departure a betrayal. They called departing leaders cowards, opportunists, and worse. What it never asked — not loudly enough, anyway — was why the betrayals kept happening, why the exits kept coming from the same tier of leadership, and why the people walking out kept winning.