The election results from West Bengal, Tamil Nadu, Kerala, Assam and Puducherry, on the surface, are a boost for the BJP and its style of electioneering — brash, in-your-face, communal, and, to top it, broadly free of restrictions that would apply to other parties under the Election Commission’s model code of conduct.

If Assam is seen as a predictable BJP victory and Tamil Nadu as a favourable BJP result in that a strong anti-BJP voice in the leadership of M.K. Stalin’s DMK has been reined in, then West Bengal is the prize that would make the BJP stand out and the Opposition cry foul. The state that has resisted the saffron advance for decades finally makes way for the BJP in a bitterly contested election against the incumbent chief minister Mamata Banerjee and her Trinamool Congress (TMC), but this is a result not without its concerns, complexities and worries.

This is the first time that the BJP will take power in West Bengal, which has not had a national party leading the state since Siddhartha Shankar Ray of the Congress left office as chief minister on 30 April 1977. This clearly represents a tectonic shift in the landscape of Bengal politics and will have its impact across the nation. The state that was led by the Communist Party of India (Marxist) for over 23 years and by the TMC for 15 years now goes to the BJP.

But the West Bengal result raises important questions about the fairness and robustness of the election process itself, and to the extent that it may erode faith in the process, it brings every other election and the result it produces into doubt. This strikes at the roots of the democratic form of government in ways that are all too obvious, but these worries will be easily brushed aside by the BJP in the first flush of victory.

With its workers busy distributing ladoos at street corners in Kolkata, the BJP will be unwilling and unable to see the price that its victory in West Bengal will exact on the nation, particularly if serious questions on the process are not answered and if numbers show that the decisive factor in this election was the alleged targeted deletion of voters under the special intensive revision (SIR) of voter rolls.

At the time of writing this, the BJP leads and wins together were above 200 in the West Bengal Assembly of 294, while the TMC was in the mid-80s. The BJP vote share stood at 45.4 per cent towards the evening, up from TMC's 40.85 per cent, according to live data put up by the Election Commission. The numbers will change as more results come in.

In the most recent election, the 2024 Lok Sabha polls, the BJP vote share was 38.73 per cent, behind TMC’s 45.76 per cent. Thus, in two years, between two key elections, the BJP in West Bengal has delivered dramatic growth — its vote share trailed by 7.03 percentage points and now it leads by 4.55 percentage points over the TMC. In theory, this is possible for a variety of reasons, but West Bengal still may present some challenges with respect to the numbers.

It is, of course, too early to do a full-fledged analysis based entirely on numbers and voting shares since not all results are in. Yet, if indications are that the SIR appears to stand as a plausible cause for the dramatic emergence of the BJP in West Bengal, then there will be a lot of discomfort with the results. If subsequently this is found to hold, the BJP victory will bring massive costs later in terms of paying the price for playing with the system. It will also leave a lot for the Election Commission to answer.

In Tamil Nadu, the result has delivered a surprising reversal for the DMK. Actor-turned-politician Vijay’s Tamilaga Vettri Kazhagam (TVK) is in the lead with over 100 seats, with the DMK coming in as the second largest party at 62. With counting still on at the time of writing, it is not clear if Vijay’s party will go past the halfway mark of 118 required to form a government.

Yet, the emerging picture is of TVK on its own or with support from other groups or alliances taking power in the state. This, too, represents a monumental shift in the politics of Tamil Nadu and of India. This is the first time in 50 years that Tamil Nadu would have broken away from the politics of the DMK versus AIADMK that the state political arena has seen play out in every election.

It is too early to say what this means or how Vijay will play out as chief minister, particularly in his relationship with the BJP. Vijay has opposed the BJP’s pet scheme of ‘one nation, one election’ and has in the past described the BJP as an ideological foe and the DMK as a political rival. Yet, the BJP may wish to have him on its side, if only to stem criticism and improve its equations in a state that has been a strong opponent of its politics.

In Kerala, the Congress has come to power after a decade with 63 seats in a House of 140. The BJP has won three Assembly seats for the first time — an achievement of sorts, given that the party has historically struggled in the state, securing just one MLA in 2016 and one MP in 2024. This gradual expansion of the BJP’s footprint suggests that sustained political effort can yield results even in resistant terrain, and calls for an equally determined and vigilant Opposition.

At the end of the day, this is a political battle that shows the BJP to be an unstoppable steamroller, now controlling power across the north, the west and the east. The Opposition parties, which have been unable to come together with a coherent strategy for the long haul, will have to once again rethink their approach.

It is clear that the BJP of today will stop at nothing in doing the deals it needs to take power — from breaking political parties, using investigative agencies, to increasing the communalisation of politics — driven by the belief that the ends justify the means. If this is to be challenged, the Opposition will have to set aside differences, unite, and rebuild around principles and values that many argue have eroded in Indian politics.

Views are personal. Jagdish Rattanani is a journalist and faculty member at SPJIMR. More of his writing may be found here

Article courtesy: The Billion Press