These Assembly elections were the rare polls in a long time in which two Opposition parties, the Trinamool Congress and DMK, were seen to be having an edge against the mighty BJP. In the end, it was the BJP that emerged stronger.
The BJP’s victory in West Bengal even as it retained Assam for the third time marks a new high in the expansion of the party in India. Once considered a force only in the Hindi belt, it has extended its reach to all of Eastern India by seizing the Bengal fortress, after having conquered the West. While the South remains out of reach, the states under the BJP now constitute almost 80% of the population of India, as per the 2011 Census.
Monday’s results also mean that the BJP has eradicated virtually all rival satraps who could pose a challenge to its authority, with the defeats of Mamata Banerjee, M K Stalin and Pinarayi Vijayan following the enfeeblement of Sharad Pawar and Arvind Kejriwal, and the fading away of Nitish Kumar and Naveen Patnaik.
In the South as well, sources said, it is too early to call the BJP’s performance a “setback”. If in Kerala, the party posted its best-ever performance winning three Assembly seats, in Tamil Nadu, the BJP is reportedly keeping a hand stretched to Vijay’s TVK, the stunning winner of Monday. “The BJP had a channel open to Vijay till the last minute, and since his party seems to be not in a position to form a government on its own, we will keep our options open. We can play a constructive role in government formation,” a source said.
Though victory in only 1 Tamil Nadu seat will be disheartening for the BJP, and underlines the limitations of the party’s Hindutva message in the state, it can draw satisfaction from the fact that Stalin’s belligerent anti-delimitation voice will be muted for now. Besides, BJP ally AIADMK looks headed for 48 seats, more than what the party was expected to get.
BJP leaders also underlined that the 3 seats in Kerala had to be weighed against the state’s fierce bipolar politics, which has for decades swung between the CPI(M)-led LDF and the Congress-led UDF. Before Monday, the BJP’s sole electoral wins in Kerala had been its 2024 victory from the Thrissur Lok Sabha seat, and its maiden win from Nemom in the 2016 Assembly elections. On Monday, state BJP chief Rajeev Chandrasekhar won Nemom back.
That only the BJP won as an incumbent on Monday, across four states and the UT of Puducherry, will also be gratifying for the party. If it won Assam for the third time in a row, with a bigger tally than in 2021, its coalition with the All India N R Congress is returning to power in Puducherry.
A senior BJP leader said the results were an early indication that the party was well on its way to reclaiming its premier place in national politics in the next general elections. “This is the sweetest revenge for the setback we faced in 2024,” the leader said.
Another senior leader proclaimed that it was the first time since 1905 (the Bengal Partition, which the British reversed two years later) that Hindu consolidation had taken place in the state. “In fact, Monday’s results indicate that wherever Hindu consolidation has taken place, the BJP is the winner – be it West Bengal or Assam,” the leader said.
BJP leader Suvendu Adhikari, the Leader of Opposition in the West Bengal Assembly, who is among the leading CM contenders now, said that while there was a clear consolidation of Hindu votes behind the party, the BJP had also managed to create cracks in the Muslim support base of the TMC in the state.
One of the chief architects of the BJP victory in Bengal was Union Home Minister and BJP master strategist Amit Shah, who spent unprecedented pre-poll time in the state after taking several steps to straighten the party’s course. These included appointing as state BJP chief Samik Bhattacharya, an old-timer, last year, thus giving the party a voice and a face among the Bengali genteel class, with Adhikari seen as the aggressive, street leader.
Along with Bhattacharya, Union minister Bhupender Yadav, the BJP Bengal in-charge, gradually brought back disgruntled leaders to the party fold and clawed back a base on the ground against the TMC’s pushback.
Visible representation on the ground helped the BJP increase its acceptance, get rid of the outsider tag, and encourage its supporters to come forward, sources pointed out.
With the Bengal victory, the BJP has also put to rest associations of the party strictly with “Hindu, Hindi, Hindustan”, and rough, combative politics. Despite drawing symbolic inspiration from Bengali formulations, be it the national song Vande Mataram, the ideas of Vivekananda and Aurobindo Ghose, or the conception of Bharat Mata, the BJP and, before it, the Jana Sangh remained a marginal force in Bengal for several decades, primarily because the Bengali bhadralok – a loose term used to describe largely middle-class and upper-caste Bengali Hindus – sought to forge a distinctively Bengali Hinduism over time.
With the BJP now in power across UP, Bihar, Bengal, Odisha and Assam, not to mention the West and Central India, the perception that these constitute very different cultural and political zones has been flattened. It also reinforces the BJP’s ideological claim that Indian civilization constitutes a single entity.
As per this understanding, the defeat of the DMK is also a validation of the BJP’s politics, as the party of resistance to “Hindi imposition” and delimitation has been beaten by the TVK, a new party.
In fact, the failure of the TMC and DMK is an overall boost for the Modi government against voices that have sought to frame federal concerns as the prime fault line of Indian politics.
The victory in Assam, meanwhile, means another prime ideological pitch of the BJP won out – that there was a “threat” from illegal Bangladeshi immigrants, primarily Muslim.
