Politics can sometimes change in a week much more than it does over many months. After the BJP’s disappointing 2024 Lok Sabha results were followed by big wins in several state assembly elections, it looked like Indian politics was heading toward one-party dominance. But between July 20 and August 3, the focus shifted from the opposition’s weakness to the BJP’s vulnerabilities.

On July 30, the Lok Sabha passed the Prevention of Insults to National Honour (Amendment) Bill granting Vande Mataram the same statutory protection the national anthem has enjoyed since 1971. A symbolic victory for the Hindutva movement arrived in a week that belonged, completely, to India’s youth. Five days earlier, Union Education Minister Dharmendra Pradhan had stepped down after protests led by the Cockroach Janta Party (CJP) at Jantar Mantar in Delhi. This kind of political reversal is rare in Narendra Modi’s third term, and it was led by people, many of whom were too young to have voted in 2014.

The political aftershocks did not stop in Delhi. Days later, the BJP lost Bankipur – one of its safest urban constituencies in Bihar which has been represented by the BJP’s national president or his family members for nearly three decades. Six months after Prashant Kishor’s Jan Suraaj was dismissed as an electoral experiment, it captured precisely the kind of affluent, upper-caste, urban seat that should have remained comfortably with the BJP. By-elections are imperfect predictors of broader political trends. Yet, given the wider political context, dismissing the significance of the Bankipur........

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