Poll verdicts frame people’s push for change – BJP seized that impulse, rivals paid for their standstill

THEresults of the Assembly elections in West Bengal and Tamil Nadu, Assam and Kerala, were undoubtedly shaped by factors that were state-specific. But if there is a binding theme, it is this: The BJP’s growth and spread beyond its traditional bastions into new arenas and areas coincides with the declining fortunes of its political opponents. The BJP’s energetic rise is also directly the cause of the Opposition’s waning, but that may not tell the full story.

Be it the rout of Mamata Banerjee in West Bengal and MK Stalin inTamil Nadunow, or Nitish Kumar bowing out with Lalu Prasad’s RJD failing to hold up its end in Bihar, or the eclipse of Naveen Patnaik in Odisha, or BJP’s longtime ally-turned-rival Uddhav Thackeray presiding over the Sena’s splintering in Maharashtra, or the signs of implosion inArvind Kejriwal’s AAP, or be it Congress’s seemingly unchecked slide despite its Kerala victory — the downward trajectory of the party on the other side of the BJP is not just because of the BJP, its undimmed aggression and its vast resources. It is also due to the inertia and do-nothingness of the Opposition party, its sameness and staleness in a time when a young and aspirational electorate is on the move, both literally and as part of shifting imagined communities. Quite simply, the BJP’s success lies, fundamentally, in constantly finding new ways of speaking to this people, by adding to its layered appeal. And the Opposition’s failure comes from its increasing political solipsism, its turning away from the challenges of change, its glib recourse to apocalypse-mongering.

Essentially, the verdicts in West Bengal and Tamil Nadu and Kerala frame the people’s push for change. The BJP seized the impulse and built on it in West Bengal, while a new player came in to reap the disillusion with the five-decade-old alternation of parties in Tamil Nadu. Congress benefited from the desire for change in Kerala, while in Assam, the only exception to this story, it failed to even become a receptacle for it.

THEoutcome in West Bengal, which has been, by far, the most dramatic in this round of elections, with Tamil Nadu coming in second, was made possible, above all, because Mamata Banerjee ignored the warnings. Her party, the TMC, which she led into power by uprooting a 34-year-old Left regime, did not heed the sound of the BJP’s footfall, first with only three seats in 2016, which later shot up to 77 in the 2021 assembly. It refused to brace for the competition by reflecting on its own shortcomings — be it the failure of its government to pull Bengal out of its economic slump, or its inability to check the corruption and unaccountability growing within the party. Inheriting the “party-society” model from Left rule, the TMC nurtured a network of political entrepreneurs that smudged the lines between party, institution and government like the Left’s Syndicate, but unlike it, without any constraints of ideology.

The TMC’s standstill laid the ground for the BJP, whose unrelenting determination to capture the state of Syama Prasad Mookerjee, to stitch the east to its conquests in the country’s north and west, has finally met with success. It rides on a Hindu consolidation around the spectre of the “ghuspaithiya”, projection of Banerjee’s politics as “minority appeasement”, and a combination of its criticism of Banerjee’s governance with an identity politics that was subterranean during Left rule and had risen to the surface under the rule of Didi, who had opened the floodgates.

How the SIR, which in West Bengal, more than in any other state, became an exclusionary exercise, contributed to the outcome, will be known in days to come. The 27 lakh excluded in the controversial second round of deletions, whose appeals are still pending (less than 2000 were reinstated by the tribunals), are a challenge for the new government to address urgently. For now, however, the spotlight must rest on the scale of the BJP’s Bengal’s victory.

THEsweep of newcomer Vijay and his party TVK, is at once a rare and familiar phenomenon in Tamil Nadu’s politics. Another star is reborn as a leader – in the footsteps, arguably, of MGR and Jayalalithaa,Vijayakanthand Kamal Haasan. But Vijay is also unique. His immersion in Dravidian politics is less explicit and his appeal to the young and to women much more direct. He makes what was for about 50 years a bipolar contest into a triangular fight. Vijay’s newness, his straddling of the caste and religious divides, also means that his real difficulties begin now – they will lie in delivering on the vaulting expectations that have led to this wide yearning for change, this anti-incumbency verdict in a state that, ironically, ranks among the fastest growing states in the country.

In Assam,Himanta Biswa Sarma’s return is a testament to a politics that is astute in seeing and filling a gap — but also divisive. Sarma has further stamped the BJP’s imprimatur in the northeastern state, which also lay outside its traditiona