To pre-empt the self-satisfied liberal pretensions that Indian democracy tends to make, I want to begin this column with a caveat that paraphrases Carl von Clausewitz’s famous quote on war: Institutions are a continuation of politics by other means. More on this later. But now let us look at the election results of the states and their characteristics one by one.
BJP achieved its third consecutive victory in Assam. The Congress needs to look at just one statistic to understand its overall plight: it has scored a hat-trick of having more Muslims than Hindus among its MLAs, even though the Congress has only a third of the state’s population.
In West Bengal, BJP finally succeeded in ousting TMC from power. The BJP’s 45% vote share, assuming that only Hindus voted for it, suggests a consolidation of about two-thirds of the Hindu voters. This is much more than what it has achieved in any state election even in its strongest bastion Gujarat.
In Kerala, the Congress managed to oust the CPI(M) from power, thereby rectifying a once-in-four-decade glitch in the norm of changing power in every election in 2021. But what is really path-breaking in state politics is that the BJP has got almost 15% of the popular votes for the first time. If Axis My India’s exit poll data is to be believed – they got the BJP’s vote share right – the BJP has about one-fourth of the Hindu votes in the state, which also includes the Ezhava and Nair communities. These two social groups have historically united behind the CPI(M) and the Congress. The BJP’s inroads among them represent a major change in the political behavior of Hindus in the state.
In Tamil Nadu, the biggest story of this election in the state is the emergence of an apolitical second rate MGR as Vijay’s TVK. It was natural for MG Ramachandran to rise to stardom in both politics and cinema. His split with the DMK occurred at the height of the political strength of the Dravidian movement, making it impossible to reconcile the personal ambitions of Comrade Karunanidhi and MGR. However, Vijay has stormed the doors of the state’s now-consolidated Dravidian monopoly – the combined vote share of the DMK and AIADMK (except their allies) has fallen below the 50% mark in 2026, an all-time low – at a time when the DMK is seen to be steeped in corruption and nepotism and the AIADMK is politically orphaned after the demise of its leader Jayalalithaa and now It is increasingly being seen as a stooge of the BJP. The politics of victory is, by all indications, more rhetorical than substantive and seems to have benefited from disillusionment with the regime rather than an ideological coup.
Is there a common thread between these different state-wise observations? Three things can be cited.
West Bengal has now joined Assam in the club of highly communally polarized states. The BJP has been able to break the 45%-50% vote share figure by consolidating around 70% Hindu voters in these two states. It has done so by pushing narratives of competing linguistic and cultural nationalisms. In Assam, it was able to resolve differences between Assamese and Bengali-speaking Hindus, despite the historical antipathy among Hindus towards Hindu-speaking people. In West Bengal, it managed to overcome the tag of being an outsider (read non-Bengali) party, which was the mainstay of TMC’s regional exceptionalism campaign this time. Even in Kerala, the BJP can claim to have more than one-fourth Hindus and even some Christians behind it. Assam, West Bengal and Kerala are the top three states in terms of share of Muslims in India. BJP is much more popular in these states today than before 2014. Anti-Muslim rhetoric in these states – Bangladeshi in Assam and West Bengal and taunts like “Muslim League Congress” in Kerala – have been an integral part of the BJP campaign.
This is the first important point: politics based on communal dog-fighting is not yet at its peak in this country.
Unlike the TMC in West Bengal, which has been ideology-free and historically opportunistic – it was allied with the BJP until 2004 – the CPI(M) in Kerala and the DMK in Tamil Nadu were considered ideological political animals. That both suffered losses rather than gains in these elections – losses that can be attributed to them becoming sect-based corrupt platforms rather than politically vibrant organizations – should inspire serious introspection. Has his ideologically self-righteous and convenient rhetoric against the BJP blinded him from the basic rules of propriety and honesty in political life? More importantly, what have these parties done to renew their political dominance since the days of the Swabhiman Movement and class struggle? What do these politically loaded and well-meaning words mean in everyday politics for the next generation of leaders and workers in these parties? The Congress and Mandal parties (as is the case with the RJD and JD(U) in Bihar) are already ideologically disorganized. The weakening of the Communists – they will not run a state government for the first time in 50 years – and the Dravidian current underline a serious political-ideological crisis in the non-right spectrum of Indian politics.
This is the second main achievement. Unless this ideological decline is stopped and reversed, the anti-BJP political ideological camp will face an (anti) Agatha Christie climax of “And Then There Were None”.
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It is on this serious note that one needs to reconsider the opposition’s “institutional dice have been thrown against us” charge. Did the Election Commission of India (ECI), the guardian angel of free and fair elections in the country, act contrary to its mandate in these elections? Yes it did. The fact that the targeted and disproportionate removal of Muslim voters in West Bengal is a violation of principles of natural justice – many of those removed during the adjudication portion of the SIR could potentially be back in the list – is the clearest evidence of this. Have the investigating agencies controlled by the Center been used to intimidate and disrupt the opposition’s campaign in the states? This practice has become so obvious that it has now become a cliché. Is the BJP much ahead of its rivals in terms of political spending using money from big businesses in the country? This is more a problem of magnitude than direction – when the Congress was dominant it left its rivals behind – but it is extremely relevant to the state of political competition.
However, it is important to underline here that the only concrete political outcome of these institutional excesses of the BJP has been the consolidation of Muslim votes behind the major opposition parties in the states, which has actually helped the BJP in counter-polarisation even more. What about non-Muslim voters? Answering this requires grappling with a different question: Does institutional bias mean that democratic competition in the country is a completely stage-managed exercise? Far away from.
The BJP, apart from the core Hindutva component of its political strategy – which caters to the overwhelming majority in this country and thus enjoys political insurance – has made drastic changes in its political economy approach to handling elections in the last 12 years since it captured power. It has realized that the first generation asset transfer-based programs are not enough to find the ingredients to serve the Hindutva jam to the voters. Cash-transfers, the much-maligned freebie by none other than the Prime Minister, have been fully embraced by the BJP to maintain and expand its political footprint.
From the economic point of view, there is no difference in the governance programs of any political party in this country. All are trying to maintain an economic system by insisting on economic palliative measures that have produced high, but not that high, growth amidst huge inequality. Unfortunately, the opposition’s murky counterparts like backward caste politics, regional exceptionalism etc. do not seem capable of having the physical bread to make the sandwich of electoral victory.
So, apart from liquidationist babble, what should be done? The latter is exactly what keeps harping endlessly on institutional capture because it is tantamount to accepting that the BJP cannot be defeated as long as it is in power.
To answer this question it will be useful to go back to the history of West Bengal. The seed capital of BJP’s recent rise in the state used to be the Hindu voters of CPI(M) in the state. If they have no hesitation in doing business with the BJP now, why did this group support the Left, when the Hindu Mahasabha had a substantial footprint in West Bengal at the time of independence, which was also a communal tinderbox after partition and the large influx of Bengal Hindu migrants?
The uprooted, disenfranchised Hindu Bengali did not become a communist by abandoning his regional, religious and cultural sensibilities to embrace some Euro-centric Marxism. He did this to wage class struggle for a respectable life in the cities and to end the blatant exploitation of poor farmers in the villages. The left lost its voters not because of the weakening of its cultural credentials, but because they damaged its economic program. There is a need to re-invent the theory and practice of weaponizing politics against economic inequality and precarity, rather than fantasizing about social or culture-based silver bullet equivalents to fight the BJP today, and not (through palliative measures) that can stop the saffron chariot, and then cry wolf after the event.
(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)
