Terms of trade: Can the opposition reinvent themselves?

These facts are not mere coincidence. They capture a political reality in India. A large number of capable regional leaders are now willing to join the BJP and provide the last mile advantage in winning their states. The biggest casualty in this churning is the fate of secular secularism in Indian politics – politics against the BJP. In the end, one can say that secularism was useful to these politicians only as long as it helped them gain power.

Let’s look at a counter-example. In Kerala, the Congress has finally decided in favor of internal organizer VD Satheesan instead of high command aspirant paratrooper KC Venugopal. Perhaps what helped the former’s cause was his success in consolidating minority votes behind the Congress in a state where they actually had a clear option of voting for the non-BJP non-Congress option, namely the Communist Party of India (Marxist) or the CPI(M). Certainly, CPI(M)’s own approach helped the Congress cause. In some ways, the 2026 fight in Kerala was a reversal of the politics of 2021, when the Congress strongly attacked the CPI(M) on the issue of Sabarimala temple entry – read soft Hindutva – over a reactionary majority. This time it was the CPI(M) which was accusing the Congress of supporting minority communalism.

A similar story, albeit on a much smaller scale, is playing out in other states too. In places like Bihar and West Bengal, where Muslims were confident of their election, they abandoned supporting the primary secular party in favor of other non-BJP options. The moral of the story is clear. Muslims have been taken lightly without any political agency. The question is, can an anti-BJP party retain its Hindu support while systematically representing Muslims rather than worrying about their support?

Let us now turn to the economic part of politics. Every political party in the country is now working on cash transfers to win elections. Everything else, including handling the challenge of boosting manufacturing, does not matter for the election outcome. There is talk among many commentators on the Tamil Nadu results that Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam had to face defeat.

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Cash transfers provide initial benefits to the incumbent. But the latest election cycle shows he is not immune from challengers after all. A rising BJP in West Bengal, a political newcomer in Tamil Nadu or a traditional challenger in Kerala won this time against economic populism. The winning parties have promised not to stop these benefits. Therefore, voters actually had no objection to the change of power.

Religious differences between Hindus and Muslims and economic convergence yielding existential benefits represent a fundamental victory of democracy in the limited sense of majority in electoral contests. Is socially majoritarian and economically palliative politics the ultimate destiny of India? After all, it’s far from optimal.

However, the most interesting thing about politics is that the majority can be persuaded to change their views. To do this requires reimagining politics. It must be a politics that is invested in disrupting the status quo and not in extracting limited benefits from it. This is what India’s opposition needs to do today.

In the social sphere, the Hindu majority will need to be explained that defaming the Muslim majority through illegal infiltrators or other tricks is merely an act of schadenfreude. This should be an organic process rather than rhetorical rhetoric about institutional annihilation that makes little effort to develop a cross-community dialogue at the grassroots level. Although it may seem distasteful to some, the typical secular politics of the 1990s has not helped prevent the political ghettoization of Muslims in large parts of the country. In many parts it has also encouraged unscrupulous elements within Muslims, which has only strengthened communal stereotypes.

In the economic sphere, the opposition should focus on breaking the consensus on a palliative path to peace in our political economy. It should look for issues where the fault lines are wider than even modest cash transfers that can be accomplished.

This is a politics that will require people to stay at the barricades when things go wrong instead of throwing pieces at them to prevent them from hitting the barricades. How many opposition parties have a grip on the unrest within India’s manufacturing workforce, which has erupted intermittently over the past few months? What are they doing to create an organic leadership from this young, angry and always uncertain underclass?

Certainly, the approach cannot be a mindless protest. It should focus on the structural weaknesses in the broader Indian economic situation. How honest has India’s political establishment talked about these issues? Is there really any theory as to what has happened in the last 35 years since India adopted economic reforms? What do terms like anti-neoliberalism or Nehruvian socialism mean in actual practice for the opposition’s economic outlook?

Also read: Terms of trade: The 2026 battle for West Bengal, seen historically

Do existing party structures, committed to control and access to political finance, even allow for such ideological learning, unlearning and churning? Certainly, political finance is dominated not only in the opposition but also in the BJP. But the latter is enjoying the best alignment of contradictions for its politics. On the religious question, India is strongly inclined towards Hindutva dominated politics. On the social (within Hindus) question, the BJP is representative enough to avert the old school social justice challenge. Those fanatics who still consider BJP an upper caste party may disagree but the facts clearly show this. My colleague Nishant Ranjan has created a historical caste database of Chief Ministers, Deputy Chief Ministers and Council of Ministers over the years. On the economic question, the BJP is enjoying a strong tailwind from both the capital and the lower classes. And its overall dominance allows the BJP to promote ideological foot soldiers rather than opportunistic local money bags within its ranks. Money flows into the party coffers from top to bottom instead of bottom to top.

Most of the questions raised here are not easy to answer even in principle, let alone in terms of developing effective political methodology around them. Working on and exploiting these contradictions will require a degree of creative destruction of the opposition’s existing political capital. Inertia may be too much for political actors who are committed to their own future, not to the future of their politics.

Is this why the opposition is happy to make the excuse of BJP’s dominance arising from institutional capture? Although this theory has some merit, it also means that the opposition is still engaged 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 as a criticism of their political philosophy. Ultimately, they are being defeated by a political philosophy that has taken religion as its core worldview, but has evolved over the last hundred years to better align itself with class and caste. Anyone who expects this to be challenged merely through arithmetic has either a superficial or dishonest view of Indian politics today.

(Roshan Kishore, HT’s data and political economy editor, writes a weekly column on the state of the country’s economy and its political fallout, and vice versa)