BJP Makes Major Gains in 3 of 5 State Assembly Elections
The Narendra Modi-led Hindu supremacist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) has emerged victorious in three of the five Indian states that voted in recent assembly elections.
The party’s biggest success was in the eastern state of West Bengal, where the BJP, which had little presence in the state, stormed to power, ousting the Mamata Banerjee-led Trinamool Congress government, which was seeking a fourth straight term in office. While the election result in Bengal marks a tectonic shift, the BJP’s return to power in Assam and Puducherry saw incumbent BJP governments winning a strong mandate from voters.
In Keralam in southern India, the Congress-led United Democratic Front (UDF) recorded an overwhelming victory, winning 100 seats in the 140-member assembly. The Left Democratic Front, which was in power in Keralam won just 35 seats.
In neighboring Tamil Nadu, film star-turned-politician Vijay and his newly minted political party, the Tamilaga Vettri Kazhagam (TVK), upstaged Chief Minister M.K. Stalin and his Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam (DMK). The TVK won 108 seats in the 234-seat Tamil Nadu assembly.
The results are hugely significant. In 2014, when the BJP came to power nationally, it was in power in just eight states. With the latest round of assembly elections, it now has 18 states under its belt. A poll analysis by the TV network India Today pointed out that 72 percent of India’s land mass and 78 percent of its population is under BJP rule.
Speaking at the BJP headquarters in New Delhi yesterday evening, an ebullient Prime Minister Narendra Modi said that with the West Bengal election result, the “‘lotus’ is blooming from Gangotri to Ganga Sagar.” The lotus is the party symbol of the BJP.
Home Minister Amit Shah of the BJP had described the Bengal polls as a referendum on Banerjee’s governance. With the BJP determined to win the Bengal elections, Shah personally micromanaged the poll campaign in the state’s 294 constituencies. In the final count, the BJP bagged 206 seats, a threefold increase over its 2021 tally of 77. The TMC trailed far behind with only 81 seats, a sharp fall from the 213 seats it won five years ago.
For the BJP, Bengal had turned into an ego battle, with the country’s only woman chief minister, Banerjee, openly challenging the powerful Modi-Shah combine and its coercive tactics, including the use of central agencies like the Enforcement Directorate, the Central Bureau of Investigation, and Income Tax raids, to subdue political opponents. This had enabled the BJP-led central government to decimate opposition-led governments in several states. This was the case with the former Delhi Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal and his Aam Aadmi Party.
In the run-up to the 2026 assembly elections, the Election Commission initiated the Special Intensive Revision (SIR) of electoral rolls in 12 states at the behest of the Modi government, ostensibly to “clean up” the electoral rolls.
In West Bengal, this resulted in the mass deletions of voters on specious grounds described as “logical discrepancies.” Overall, 9 million names, or 12 percent of the voter lists, were deleted – the largest revision in any state in India’s electoral history. Analysis of the deleted voter lists reflected a communal tone; a majority of those deleted are Muslims.
Muslims account for 27 percent of Bengal’s population and have tended to gravitate towards the TMC. In the 2021 Assembly polls, the TMC swept 84 of the 88 Muslim-dominated seats. It is alleged that the Election Commission, working in collusion with the BJP, deleted Muslim names. The SIR exercise most impacted the Muslim vote bank, which the BJP conveniently branded as “Bangladeshis” and “foreigners.”
In Bengal in 2026, the BJP triggered an unprecedented scale of communal polarization. BJP senior leader and possibly Bengal’s next chief minister, Suvendu Adhikari, has openly attributed the saffron wave to “Hindu vote consolidation.”
The BJP’s outreach to women voters by offering freebies that doubled the cash entitlement schemes of the TMC whipped up anti-incumbency sentiment against the TMC. Banerjee herself was defeated by Adhikari in her stronghold, the Bhabanipur constituency in the heart of Kolkata.
In control of the central government, the BJP deployed every possible tool at its disposal in its fight against the regional TMC. It swamped Bengal with central security forces and deployed armored personnel carriers on the streets. The fear psychosis created by the SIR exercise, especially among poor sections of the public, impelled hundreds of thousands of Bengali migrant workers to rush back to the state to vote. They had sensed that this was more than just a vote; it was a test of citizenship.
Speaking about the Bengal elections a few days ago, political activist Yogendra Yadav had predicted a lead for the TMC. If the BJP were to win, he said, it would raise serious concerns about electoral fraud and could prompt the opposition to reconsider participating in elections under current conditions.
Strong regional leaders like Stalin in Tamil Nadu, Banerjee in Bengal, and Kerala’s Chief Minister Pinarayi Vijayan were defeated in these elections. It could have a major impact on the opposition’s INDIA alliance. It was strong regional parties like the TMC, the DMK and the LDF that set up the INDIA bloc to take on the BJP in parliament. With several of these parties decimated in the election, there is now little left in terms of a credible opposition to challenge the Modi government.
It also marked a defeat of regional cultural pride, especially in Bengal, of “Joy Bangla” (Victory to Bengali pride), which has now been overrun by the BJP’s Hindi heartland slogan, “Jai Sri Ram.”
The Tamil Nadu election result marks the return of film stars to the center stage of state politics. Superstar Vijay, 51, has spent over three decades in the Tamil film industry and is popularly called Thalapathy, which means commander or leader in Tamil. The fact that his TVK could unseat the DMK, which had delivered robust economic growth for the state (11.2 percent GDP), underscores voter dissatisfaction with political power alternating between the two Dravidian parties, the DMK and the All-India Anna DMK (AIADMK). Stalin himself lost in the Kolathur constituency, his stronghold since 2011. The DMK has been reduced to 59 seats, while the AIADMK-BJP alliance secured 45 seats. Five years ago, the DMK-Congress alliance had won 133 seats.
Vijay, who has made clear his chief ministerial ambitions, has to date not given a single interview to the press; he needs to show a combined 118 seats to stake claim to government in Tamil Nadu. Vijay needs the support of other parties to form a government. He is expected to turn to the Congress party. Already, Congress parliamentarian Rahul Gandhi stated on X that he had spoken to Vijay and warmly congratulated him on the “spectacular results.”
Unlike elsewhere in the country, the Congress camp is celebrating in Keralam, with the UDF coalition in the state, which it leads, ending the decade-long rule of the LDF. Despite deep factionalism in the Congress’ Keralam unit, the campaign by the Gandhi siblings, Rahul and Priyanka (the latter represents the Wayanad constituency in Keralam in parliament), worked in the party’s favor, propelling it to power. The BJP has won just three seats in the state.
The verdicts in Assam in India’s Northeast and the union territory of Puducherry in the south were along expected lines, with the BJP and its National Democratic Alliance retaining power. In Assam, Chief Minister Himanta Biswa Sarma improved his coalition’s 2021 tally of 75 seats by winning a whopping 102 out of 126 seats this time. The Congress, which was hoping for a revival in the state, could only muster 19 seats. Even Gaurav Gogoi, a three-time parliamentarian who was the Congress’ chief ministerial face, lost the elections from Jorhat constituency. With its victory in Assam, the BJP-led coalition has won a third straight term in power, while Sarma is headed for a second term as chief minister.
The BJP can be expected now to implement in Bengal the controversial National Register of Citizens, as it did in Assam. This could result in a large number of Muslims, who had been struck off the electoral rolls, being pushed into detention camps allegedly for lack of proof of citizenship. Throughout its campaign in Bengal, the BJP voiced anti-Muslim rhetoric, resulting in Hindu-Muslim polarization.
It would not be too far-fetched to say that it is just a matter of time before the BJP gets into the saddle in Tamil Nadu and Keralam as well, as it has now in Bengal. Also, the BJP’s growing footprint across the country makes it a colossus that will be difficult to dislodge anytime in the near future, including in the national elections in 2029.
Incidentally, West Bengal alone accounts for 42 seats in the 543-member Lok Sabha, the lower house of the Indian parliament.
The recent verdict establishes saffron hegemony in India and the unquestionable grip of Modi’s authoritarian regime across the country. The last centers of resistance against the Modi juggernaut have also crumbled.
With its rivals within the INDIA bloc, like the TMC, much weakened, the Congress might tend to believe it is the BJP’s prime challenger in the country. However, its lack of organizational strength in most states makes this a pipe dream.
With the strong challenge posed by the DMK and TMC to the BJP’s pet projects like the delimitation exercise of constituencies (favoring northern states at the cost of the southern states) now gone, the BJP can be expected to go ahead full steam on these controversial projects.
Barring the Gandhis, Modi has been able to silence all his other challengers in the opposition. For the first time, the Left parties are not in power in any state in the country.
