West Bengal's political colours: From Left's red to BJP's next palette
Colour has long served as a political language in West Bengal, with each regime stamping its ideological identity across public spaces — from government buildings and roadside curbs to rally tents and facades. Over the last five decades, the state has literally changed hue with every shift in power, most vividly from the Left Front's revolutionary red to the Trinamool Congress (TMC)'s blue-and-white — and now, reportedly, on the cusp of another transformation under the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP).
The Left's Red: An Era Painted in Revolution
For 34 years of uninterrupted rule, the Left Front government suffused West Bengal's public spaces in red — the colour of communist ideology and working-class solidarity. The saturation ran so deep that the administration reportedly even considered repainting the top of the historic Shaheed Minar, the towering monument in central Kolkata originally erected by the British around 1828 to honour their war heroes, and rededicated in 1969 to the martyrs of India's freedom movement.
The red facade of the old state secretariat, the Writers' Building at BBD Bagh (Dalhousie Square), fit the era's political aesthetic — though the building had been painted in that shade long before the Left came to power. Built in 1777 by the British East India Company to house clerks — hence its name — the Writers' Building evolved into a colonial icon and, subsequently, the nerve centre of West Bengal's governance.
Mamata Banerjee and the Blue-and-White Shift
When Mamata Banerjee ended the Left's dominance in 2011, she brought with her a new political palette. Blue-and-white — the colours of TMC — rapidly replaced red across the state's public infrastructure. Banerjee reportedly said the blue symbolised the idea that
