The Pulse | Politics | South Asia

BJP Makes Major Gains in 3 of 5 State Assembly Elections

Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s party has stormed to power in West Bengal and retained its hold over Assam and Puducherry.

Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) supporters celebrate the party’s sweeping victory in the West Bengal assembly election in Kolkata, India, May 4, 2026.

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........

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