It is useful to start this column by highlighting the commonalities between the BJP chief ministers of Assam, Bihar and West Bengal. Together these states have almost as many Lok Sabha seats as there are Congress seats today. Himanta Biswa Sarma was a senior leader of the Congress Party in Assam before joining the BJP. Suvendu Adhikari was a Trinamool Congress leader in West Bengal and his father was a Congress member before he joined the TMC and then the BJP. Samrat Chaudhary and his father started politics in Mandal parties and succeeded in it. All these defections and joinings to the BJP happened after 2014, once the party had established its national dominance and done enough to indicate that it could win these states.
These facts are not just a coincidence. They embody the political reality in India. There are now a large number of capable regional leaders willing to join the BJP and provide it with a last-mile advantage in winning their states. The biggest casualty in this mess is the fate of proverbial secularism – anti-BJP politics – in the Indian political system. In hindsight, one could say that secularism was beneficial to these politicians only as long as it helped them come to power.
Let’s look at a counterexample. In Kerala, the Congress finally decided in favor of in-house organizer VD Satheesan instead of the paratrooper wannabe from the high command, KC Venugopal. Perhaps what helped the former’s cause was its success in rallying minority votes behind the Congress in one state where they actually had a clear choice to vote for a non-BJP alternative outside the Congress Party, or specifically the Communist Party of India (Marxist) or the Communist Party of India (Maoist). The approach taken by the Communist Party of India has certainly helped the Congress’s cause. In some ways, the 2026 contest in Kerala mirrored the 2021 controversy, when the Congress rabidly attacked the CPI(M) over the issue of Sabarimala temple entry – read soft Hindutva – from the plank of the reactionary majority. This time it was the Communist Party (Maoist) that accused the Congress of supporting the sectarian minority.
A similar story, albeit on a much smaller scale, has played out in other states as well. In places like Bihar and West Bengal, Muslims, in parts where they were confident of being elected, broke away from supporting the primary secular party in the contest for options other than the BJP. The moral of the story is clear. Muslims took it for granted without political authority. The question is, can an anti-BJP party retain its Hindu support while organically representing Muslims instead of being cautious about their support?
Let’s move on to the economic part of politics now. Every political party in the country is now working on cash transfers to win elections. Everything else, including overcoming the challenge of boosting manufacturing, does not seem important for electoral results. This has been the recurring phrase among many commentators on the Tamil Nadu results which saw the Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam lose.
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Cash transfers give the incumbent an initial advantage. But the latest election cycle shows they are not immune to challengers forever. The BJP, a rising party in West Bengal, a political newcomer in Tamil Nadu, or a traditional rival in Kerala, has triumphed over economic populism this time. The winning parties promised not to stop these benefits. So voters didn’t really mind the changing of the guard.
The religious divergence between Hindus and Muslims and the economic convergence in the distribution of the benefits of survival represent a fundamental victory for democracy in the limited sense of the prevailing majority in electoral competition. Is social majoritarianism and economic palliation the ultimate destiny of India? After all, it is far from optimal.
But the most wonderful thing about politics is that it is possible to persuade a majority to change its views. Doing this requires reimagining policy. It must be a policy invested in breaking the status quo rather than seeking limited benefits from it. This is precisely what the Indian opposition must do today.
In the social sphere, it may require convincing the Hindu majority that denigrating the Muslim majority to the point of being illegal infiltrators or through other subterfuges is merely an act of schadenfreude. This needs to be an organic process and not just liberal clamor about institutional apocalypse that makes little effort to develop cross-community dialogue at the grassroots level. While it may seem unpalatable to some people, typical secular policies since the 1990s have not helped contain the political isolation of Muslims in large parts of the country. In many parts, this also encouraged unscrupulous elements within Muslims, which only served to reinforce sectarian stereotypes.
In the economic sphere, the opposition must focus on breaking the consensus on the palliative path to peace in our political economy. It must look for cases where the fault lines are wider than paltry cash transfers can meet.
This is a policy that will require people to be at the barricades when things are rushing instead of throwing crumbs at them to prevent people from crashing into the barricades. How many opposition parties have managed to deal with the unrest within India’s manufacturing workforce that has shown sporadic outbursts in the past few months? What are they doing to build organic leadership from this young, angry, and always unstable underclass?
Certainly this approach cannot be reckless hostility. It should focus on structural weaknesses in the broader Indian economic situation. How much honest conversation has India’s political establishment had about these issues? Does she really have a theory of what has happened in the past 35 years since India adopted economic reforms? What do words like anti-neoliberalism or Nehru socialism mean in the actual practice of the economic approach to opposition?
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Do existing party structures, committed to controlling and accessing political funding, allow such ideological learning, unlearning, and subversion? Political finance is certainly dominant not only in the opposition, but also in the BJP. But the latter has the best arrangement of contradictions in its policies. On the religious issue, India leans strongly towards Hindutva dominance of politics. On the social question (within Hindus), the BJP is representative enough to pre-empt the old-fashioned social justice challenge. Hardliners who still think of the BJP as an upper-caste party may disagree, but the facts clearly show it. My colleague Nishant Ranjan has built historical caste databases for prime ministers, deputy chief ministers, and the cabinet over the years. On the economic question, the BJP is enjoying TINA tailwinds from capital and the underclass. Its overall dominance allows the BJP to encourage ideological soldiers rather than opportunistic local moneybags within its ranks. Money flows from the top to the bottom instead of from the bottom to the top into the party coffers.
Most of the questions posed here are not easy to answer even in theory, let alone develop effective political practices around them. The orientation Working on these contradictions and exploiting them will require a degree of creative destruction of the opposition’s current political capital. The stagnation may be enormous for political parties that are clinging to their future, not the future of their policies.
Is this why the opposition is happy to invoke the excuse of BJP’s dominance arising from institutional capture? While this theory has some substance, it also means that the opposition remains invested in restoring the status quo rather than breaking it. This should not be seen as a personal criticism of the current generation of opposition leaders, but rather a criticism of their political philosophy. They are being defeated, after all, by a political philosophy that has stuck to its basic worldview of religion, but has evolved over the past hundred years to better align itself with class and caste. Anyone who hopes that it will be possible to challenge this through calculations alone is either superficial or dishonest in their approach to Indian politics today.
(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)
