To pre-empt the subjective liberal pretensions that tend toward statements about Indian democracy, let me begin this column with a warning that paraphrases Carl von Clausewitz’s famous dictum about war: Institutions are the continuation of politics by other means. More on this later. But now let us look at the state election results and their distinctive features one by one.
In Assam, the Bharatiya Janata Party achieved its third successive victory. The Congress needs to look at just one statistic to understand its overall predicament: it has scored a hat-trick by having more Muslims than Hindus among its MLAs despite the former accounting for only a third of the state’s population.
In West Bengal, the BJP finally managed to oust the TMC. The BJP’s 45% vote share, assuming that only Hindus voted for it, indicates an assimilation of about two-thirds of the Hindu electorate. This is more than she achieved even in her strongest stronghold of Gujarat in any state election.
In Kerala, the Congress managed to oust the Communist Party of India (Maoist), thus correcting a once-in-four-decade deviation from the rule of changing power in every election in 2021. But what was truly groundbreaking in state politics was the BJP getting nearly 15% of the popular vote for the first time. If the Access My India polls are to be believed – they got the BJP’s correct vote share – the BJP has about a quarter of the Hindu votes in the state, including the Ezhava and Nair communities. These two social groups tend to rally behind the CPI(M) and Congress historically. The success of the BJP among them represents a major break in the political behavior of Hindus in the state.
In Tamil Nadu, the bigger story of these elections in the state is the rise of what can only be called an apolitical second-rate MGR in the form of Vijay’s TVK. M G Ramachandran’s rise to stardom in both politics and cinema was organic. His defection from the DMK came at the height of the political prowess of the Dravidian movement which made it impossible to reconcile the personal ambitions of comrades Karunanidhi and MGR. However, Vijay has stormed the doors of the now entrenched Dravidian duopoly in the state – the combined vote share of the DMK and AIADMK (minus their allies) has fallen below the 50% mark in 2026, an all-time low – at a time when the DMK is seen as mired in corruption and nepotism, the AIADMK has been politically orphaned after the death of its leader Jayalalithaa and is now increasingly seen as a servant of the BJP. Vijay’s policies are, by all indications, more rhetorical than substantive, and appear to have benefited from disillusionment with governance rather than an ideological coup.
Is there a common thread between these apparently disparate observations at the state level? Three things can be mentioned.
West Bengal has now joined Assam in the club of highly communally polarized states. The BJP has managed to cross the 45% to 50% vote share by incorporating only about 70% of Hindu voters in both states. It did so by overcoming competing linguistic and cultural narratives of nationalism. In Assam, it has been able to reconcile the differences between Assamese and Bengali-speaking Hindus even though the former holds a historical grudge against the latter. In West Bengal, it has managed to overcome the tag of being an outsider (read non-Bengali) party, which has been very much the mainstay of the TMC’s regional extraordinary campaign this time. Even in Kerala, the BJP can claim to have succeeded in uniting more than a quarter of Hindus, and even some Christians, behind it. Assam, West Bengal and Kerala are the three largest states in terms of Muslim population in India. The BJP is significantly more popular in these states today than it was before 2014. Anti-Muslim rhetoric – Bangladeshis in Assam and West Bengal and mockery of the Muslim League-type Congress in Kerala – in these states has been an integral part of the BJP’s campaign.
This is the first main idea: sectarian politics has not yet reached its peak in this country.
In contrast to the TMC in West Bengal, which was ideologically committed and historically opportunistic – it used to ally itself with the BJP until 2004 – the Communist Party of India (Maoist) in Kerala and the MDM in Tamil Nadu were seen as ideological political monsters. That each of these elections was lost rather than won – and it is possible to attribute the losses to their transformation into corrupt sect-based platforms rather than politically vibrant organizations – should lead to serious reflection. Has their rhetoric of ideological righteousness and expediency against the BJP blinded them to the basic rules of decency and integrity in politics? More importantly, what have these parties done to renew their political dominance from the days of the self-respect movement and class struggle? What do these politically loaded, utopian terms mean in everyday politics for the next generation of leaders and workers in these parties? The Congress and Mandal parties (continuing to position themselves as RJD and JD(U) in Bihar) are already in ideological disarray. The weakening of the Communists – they will not run a state government for the first time in fifty years – and the Dravidian trend highlights a serious political-ideological crisis in the non-right-wing spectrum of Indian politics.
This is the second main takeaway. Unless this ideological atrophy is arrested and reversed, the anti-BJP ideological-political camp faces the height of Agatha Christie’s “And Then There Were None”.
Read also:Terms of Trade: 2026 Battle for West Bengal, Historically
On this dire note, one needs to reconsider the opposition’s accusation that “the institutional dice are rolling against us.” Did the Election Commission of India (ECI), the guardian of free and fair elections in the country, act in a manner unbecoming of its mandate in these elections? Yes I did. The targeted and disproportionate deletions of Muslim voters in West Bengal, a violation of the principles of natural justice – many of whom were deleted during the segregation portion of the SIR can return to the rolls – are the biggest piece of evidence. Were the Centre-controlled investigative agencies being used to intimidate and disrupt the Opposition’s campaign across states? This practice has become so blatant that it has now become a cliché. Will the BJP outspend its opponents by a large margin in political spending with money increasingly flowing from the country’s big corporations? This is a problem of scale rather than direction—Congress also outspent the opposition when it was dominant—but it is closely related to the state of political competition.
However, it is important to stress here that the only tangible political repercussions of these institutional transgressions by the BJP were the consolidation of Muslim votes behind the main opposition parties in the states, which in fact helped the BJP combat polarization further. What about non-Muslim voters? Answering this question requires engaging with a different question: Does institutional bias mean that democratic competition is a fully managed practice in the country? Far from it.
The BJP has, apart from the Hindutva core element of its political strategy – which… He caters to the overwhelming majority in this country and is therefore politically secure – making radical changes to his political economy approach to elections over the past twelve years since he first seized power. I have realized that first generation asset transfer based programs are not enough to create the material bread on which Hindutva jam can be served to the voters. The BJP has fully embraced cash transfers, a much-criticized freebie from the Prime Minister, to maintain and expand its political footprint.
Economically, there is almost no difference between the governance programs of any political party in this country. Everyone seeks to perpetuate the economic system that generated high growth, but not high enough amid great inequality, by putting pressure on economic painkillers. Unfortunately, opposition formulas like backward caste politics, regional exclusions etc., do not seem to be able to hold the material bread for making the election winning sandwich.
So, what should be done, aside from the words of the liquidators? The latter is precisely what the endless harping on institutional capture entails because it amounts to an admission that the BJP cannot be defeated as long as the BJP is in power.
It is useful to go back to the history of West Bengal to answer this question. The primary capital for the BJP’s recent rise in the state has come from the CPI(M)’s Hindu voters in the state. If they have no qualms in dealing with the BJP now, why did this group support the Left at all when the Hindu Mahasabha had enough of a footprint at the time of independence in West Bengal, which was also a communal powder keg after Partition and the influx of large numbers of Bengali Hindu migrants?
The displaced and displaced Bengali Hindu turned communist so as not to abandon his regional, religious and cultural sensibilities and embrace some Eurocentric Marxism. He did this to wage a class struggle for a decent life in the cities and to end the blatant exploitation of the poor peasants in the villages. The left lost its voters not because of its weak cultural credentials, but because it destroyed its economic program. Fighting the BJP today requires reinventing the theory and practical application of using politics as a weapon and not demobilizing it (through palliatives) against economic inequality and precarity rather than fantasizing about social or cultural silver bullet formulas that can stop the saffron juggernaut, and then screaming after the event.
(Roshan Kishore, data and political economy editor at HT, writes a weekly column on the state of the country’s economy and its political implications, and vice versa)
