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BJP had 3 seats in the state in 2016 and 77 in 2021. Watched its workers get killed, assaulted, and displaced in the post-poll violence that followed. And yet they came back. Reorganized. Took enormous personal risk. Contested again. Most people would give up. Most rational actors would look at the cost-benefit and walk away. But something about the BJP cadre defies that calculus. I have seen it up close. My uncle joined the BJP right around its inception, when the party had 2 MPs, no money, no name recognition, and no realistic path to power. We used to taunt him saying that BJP would win in his next janam. He never taunted us back when BJP won. He fought Naxals in an era when that could get you killed. Got nearly assassinated. He was badly wounded. He lost election after election. Went into debt. Sold his land. He is still in the party. Still soldiering on. There is a behavioral concept called the "sunk cost fallacy," where people irrationally persist because of what they have already invested. But what I have seen in BJP workers is not sunk cost. Sunk cost is driven by loss aversion, the inability to let go. What drives BJP workers seems something else entirely. It is conviction that outlasts evidence. Faith that precedes results. More of a belief than fallacy. And belief, when it is shared by enough people willing to absorb personal cost over decades, eventually reshapes the political landscape. West Bengal is proof.