Election results out, decoding what swung the votes in Bengal, Tamil Nadu, Kerala and Assam

Even though the actor-politician’s party fell short of an absolute majority in its maiden contest, the verdict in Tamil Nadu was enough to leave a big impact on the state’s power dynamics.

As for Assam and Puducherry, the incumbent NDA governments reemerged with a big victory. Decoding what swung the votes everywhere:

That year, in 1977, Maruthur Gopalan Ramachandran swept to power in his electoral debut, carried to power by an extraordinary coalition comprising women, young people and the poor. He would not lose another election in his lifetime.

Also Read: Vijay will be next CM of Tamil Nadu, says DMK worker as Thalapathy’s TVK pulls off a stunning debut

Never since that fateful election has a debut been as momentous in the southern state as that of Joseph Vijay Chandrasekhar, whose rookie outfit Tamilaga Vettri Kazhagam emerged as a dark horse in the Tamil Nadu assembly elections on Monday within touching distance of power. The 51-year-old actor has done what Captain Vijayakanth couldn’t do, what screen legend Rajinikanth hoped to do but never tried, and what the venerated Kamal Haasan failed to do. Using his larger-than-life image, his grassroots network of film clubs, and his cult status among the young, Vijay has successfully broken the Dravidian duopoly that held for half a century. He could become the first chief minister to not belong to either the Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam or the All India Anna Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam since Tamil Nadu was formed in 1967.

How did he manage the impossible – especially for an outfit that was launched just in February 2024, and was mired in the tragic deaths of 41 people in a party rally just months before the elections.

One, he moved away from the two Dravidian majors but not Dravidian ideology. He paid obeisance to Periyar, CN Annadurai and Ramachandran, didn’t speak ill either of M Karunanidhi or J Jayalalithaa, and said that he was committed to social justice and the uplift of the poor irrespective of community affiliation. He said he would work to restore the glory of Tamil language and secure Tamil Nadu against cultural aggression. In a state where communal polarisation has historically not worked as a mobilisation tactic, he assiduously courted every religion, visited shrines of every denomination, and underlined his identity as Tamil over any specific faith. Look at his manifesto promises – a monthly handout of ₹2,500 for every woman in Tamil Nadu, ₹10,000 for unemployed graduates, a waiver for cooperative crop loans, six free gas cylinders and a gold coin and a silk saree for every bride – that are reminiscent of the Jayalalithaa handouts, and his rhetoric – saying his vision was based on Thirukkural’s foundational qualities of aram (virtue), porul (wealth), and inbam (joy) – that harked back to the poetry of Karunanidhi, and it is clear that Vijay didn’t abandon the tested Dravidian model that had worked for both majors over the past 50 years, but simply rebooted it.

Two, this reboot hinged on his image as a brash but honest upstart who was trying to change something about a rotten system stacked against the weakest – as he had done in countless blockbusters such as Thuppakki or Mersal or Pokkiri.

In a milieu where no towering Dravidian leader was in the fray – Jayalalithaa died in 2016 and Karunanidhi two years later – and the electorate had grown weary of lofty rhetoric but grassroots politics-as-usual, Vijay appeared as someone not fitting the mould of the politician. Autorickshaw drivers in Chennai and labourers in Madurai marvelled at his palatial residences, sky high acting fees, and bevy of luxury cars, but not with resentment. They marvelled that a man who had everything could take the plunge into the dirty world of politics, and believed that a man who already had everything wouldn’t need petty bribes.

Three, Vijay leveraged his network of film clubs to not just garner supporters but also choose loyalists as candidates – people who might not have been distinguished in their everyday life, but people who were not tainted by corruption charges, and were the obverse of the proverbial big man. Many were electoral rookies but that only added to Vijay’s freshness and appeal. And it didn’t hurt that the clubs had millions of members.

Ultimately, if it seemed that everything went right for Vijay, it is also an indictment of the rot in Dravidian politics that privileged rhetoric over rights and promoted dynasty over mobility. If the DMK couldn’t curb lower-level corruption, act against local henchmen, work towards fulfilling aspirations over papering them over with doles, and chose to promote the son of a sitting chief minister only for his ancestry, how true did it stay to the aim of the rationalist ideology?

Also Read: A Dravidian mutation in Tamil Nadu called TVK

Similarly, if the AIADMK cosied up to the BJP purely in the pursuit of power, had little ideological glue holding together its campaign, and failed to build a genuinely statewide coalition, why should voters entrust it with the control of the state? Vijay asked these questions, over and over again. And on Monday, Tamil Nadu’s people answered with such resounding force that its reverberations will be felt far beyond Chennai.

The stakes were high for Sarma, who faced his first election as CM and focussed on infrastructure promises, the Orunodoi scheme that offers ₹1,250 to women, a controversial eviction drive that has forced thousands of people into makeshift camps, and scheduled tribe status to six communities.

Against him was Gaurav Gogoi, whose father Tarun Gogoi – a former mentor to Sarma – was the last person to win three elections on the trot in Assam. Gaurav Gogoi was hopeful that there were signs of anti-incumbency. He had won the Jorhat Lok Sabha constituency in 2024 despite Sarma personally campaigning against him. The Congress hoped to win big in Upper Assam on the back of its alliance with Raijor Dal and Assam Jatiya Parishad, among others.

Also Read: Decision to contest Assam polls was to fight for rights, dignity of tribals: Soren

That hope would be belied. In a border state with a troubled history of infiltration and violent agitations that have resulted in massacres, Sarma coasted to victory and pushed the National Democratic Alliance (NDA) past the 100-seat mark for the first time in history.

The Congress can blame polarisation and a controversial 2023 delimitation of seats, but it failed to put up a credible alternative to the BJP, allowed Sarma’s personality to dominate the campaign, and crumbled across the state, except for pockets in Lower Assam. Muslim consolidation failed to boost the Opposition even as smart coalition strategy helped the NDA, already in a dominant position in the northeastern state.

The victory has added more heft to Sarma’s rapidly growing national profile. The BJP now has achieved a simple majority on its own in Assam for the first time. And on the other hand, Gaurav Gogoi lost his assembly seat in Jorhat by 23,000 votes.

What happened? Bogged down by allegations of corruption – especially the scandal around the alleged theft of temple gold in Sabarimala and the Karuvannur Service Cooperative Bank corruption case – a flip-flop on ideological issues such as the entry of women into the Sabarimala shrine, and general anti-incumbency, the LDF slumped to its worst showing ever, with 13 ministers losing.

The UDF scored an easy victory and the Congress posted its best results in the state in a generation. The Bharatiya Janata Party, building on its Lok Sabha victory in Thrissur and Thiruvananthapuram municipal corporation win, secured three seats – its best performance in a state where it has traditionally struggled to find a toehold.

How did it happen? The UDF appeared to have largely held on to the gains made in the 2025 local body polls. It erased the gains made by the Left among sections of the Muslims and in north Kerala. Muslims appeared to have consolidated behind UDF constituent Indian Union Muslim League. Another ally, the PJ Joseph-led Kerala Congress , helped take back chunks of the Christian vote from the LDF. Smart candidate selection helped win a section of the Ezhava vote. The Congress attempted to hem in factionalism, backed every candidate, and pushed workers to hit the streets in numbers that surprised some allies. In rally after rally, VD Satheesan and Ramesh Chennithala spoke about the five-point Indira Guarantee, comprising free bus travel for women, ₹1,000 monthly for female college students, ₹3,000 pension, ₹25 lakh health insurance, and interest-free loans. As a result, the UDF improved on its 2025 local body vote share in every region.

In contrast, the LDF’s campaign was weighed down by anti-incumbency and resentment against chief minister Pinarayi Vijayan, whose personality loomed large over the campaign. The Left attempted to argue that infrastructure development and welfare schemes over the past decade were due to Vijayan’s personal investment. Cut-outs and hoardings featuring his face dotted the state, but was not enough to reverse the LDF’s fortunes. Instead, a bouquet of rebels and independents triumphed – Payyannur was won by V Kunhikrishnan, who was expelled by the Communist Party of India (Marxist) and fought as a UDF-supported independent; and former minister G Sudhakaran, who ended a six-decade association with the CPI(M) to fight as an independent, contested from Ambalappuzha as an independent and won.

The BJP will be happy with its showing – its highest vote and seat share in a Kerala assembly election– especially in the southern part of the state, though it will be somewhat disappointed that it lost in Palakkad. With the Left now out of power in every Indian state for the first time in almost 60 years, the BJP will believe it can carve out a more permanent space for itself in God’s Own Country.

Jadavpur is the opposite. Sitting in the heart of south Kolkata, the constituency has long sat on a throne of political prestige. Home to the eponymous university, the area is home to the educated Bengali middle-class, interspersed with columns of urban poor congregated along the railway tracks – many of whom came to India as refugees. In 1984, the Lok Sabha seat of Jadavpur saw the rise of a young woman named Mamata Banerjee. And for almost 25 years, it was the seat of Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee, senior minister and then chief minister of West Bengal, before the TMC took over.

Gosaba is unlike either of them. A smattering of islands at the mouth of the Bay of Bengal, the region is where Bengal dissolves into the Sundarbans, a vast brackish labyrinth of mangrove and tides that is no stranger to gales, menacing waves crashing against embankments and brick walls, and poor people often taking rickety boats to go to school. Most people – Dalits and Muslims dominate – survive either on subsistence farming, fishing or manual labour. A cyclone every decade drives salt water deep into the soil and pushes young men to Surat, Hyderabad, Gurugram. It is a citadel of first the Left and then the TMC.

Yet, taken together, the story of these three constituencies envelopes the saffron storm that rocked West Bengal on Monday, sweeping Mamata Banerjee away and completing arguably the Bharatiya Janata Party’s most valuable assembly election victory since Uttar Pradesh in 2017. They underline the three major factors that buoyed the BJP to its first victory in the eastern state.

One, consolidation of Hindu voters and fragmentation of Muslim voters. Using a mix of communalisation, anti-Bangladeshi rhetoric, genuine concerns about jobs and grassroots corruption, and the lure of better employment, the BJP won over roughly two-thirds of the Hindu population in the state. In Tehatta, for example, Union home minister Amit Shah held a rally to remind the electorate of the dangers of unchecked immigration, saying that the BJP would stop cow smuggling and end the “cut-money” culture of the TMC. As a result, in a Hindu-majority seat where the TMC would get roughly half of the Hindu vote alongside the Muslim vote en-bloc, the BJP surged ahead on the back of Hindu consolidation, especially among the Matua sect that comprises largely Dalit refugees from across the border. The BJP’s Subrata Kabiraj won by 28,000 votes – roughly three times the TMC’s 2021 margin.

Two, resentment at the high-handedness of TMC strongmen that counteracted the anti-Bengali accusation hurled at the BJP. In Jadavpur, for example, the BJP’s unsung candidate, Sarbori Mukherjee, might have surprised herself by winning the seat that sits at the heart of Bengal’s politics by 27,000 votes. It was a stunning reversal for the TMC that won the seat in 2021 with 45% votes. “If adding a floor to a house, or opening a new shop is always fraught with demands from the local dadas for a commission, how long can it be tolerated?” asked Bedabrata Ghosh, a local resident. In a seat dominated by salaried Bengalis, the BJP found a livewire issue that went beyond demography or regional exceptionalism – in the TMC’s citadel of Kolkata.

Three, a crack in the women’s vote due to the welfare push reaching its ceiling. In Gosaba, Malati Das wondered if she could live for the rest of her life on ₹1,500 if her sons never got a job. The house neighbouring hers had been washed away in a spell of torrential rain, and she feared her dwelling might be next. “But I don’t want to just survive. I want to live well,” she said. In 2021, Banerjee had managed to stave off the BJP’s onslaught by stitching together a coalition of women beneficiaries of her flagship schemes – Lakshmir Bhandar and Kanyashree Prakalpa key among them – that was largely agnostic of caste, region and class. In 2026, that coalition was fragmenting as the choices of urban women largely mirrored their male counterparts, and the aspiration of rural women meant that handouts were expected (after all, the BJP promised to double the Lakshmi-r Bhandar sum) and welfare was the floor, not the ceiling.

Of course, the foundation of this spectacular victory rested on two foundational pillars. One was the Special Intensive Revision (SIR) that led to the deletion of nine million names, and the proven disenfranchisement of 2.71 million among them. The exercise created an atmosphere where prevailing communal resentment among Hindus – palpable not just in Ram Navami marches in Purulia but genteel living rooms in south Kolkata – was complemented by rhetoric against the undocumented migrant. And the BJP’s biggest weakness – an absence of grassroots network in the TMC stronghold of south Bengal – was plugged by the deployment of 2,500 companies of paramilitary forces that effectively neutralised the TMC’s ground advantage. Das, after all, was clear that no one in her village would have ever thought about the BJP if they didn’t see that their choice was viable on the ground — especially in the TMC fortress of south Bengal. As a result, for the first time since 1967 – when the Jana Sangh won the seat – Bikarna Naskar of the BJP won by 16,000 seats.

In 2021, Banerjee had managed to paper over the misdeeds of her colleagues by saying she was the candidate in every seat and beseeched people to not punish their own. Five years later, that script had run its course.