Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party has further tightened its hold on Indian politics. On 4 May, when the results of elections in four Indian states were released, the BJP had retained the large state of Assam. But more crucially it won, for the first time, the state of West Bengal, ending the 15-year rule of the Trinamool Congress, a pugnacious street-fighter of a party. One of the Modi government’s principal tools in these victories was the Special Intensive Revision, a revamp of electoral rolls that purged at least nine million voter names in West Bengal. Muslims, demonised and physically attacked by the BJP, made up more than a third of these deletions – disproportionately higher than their share of state’s population.

As vote-counting progressed, the BJP tweeted out an animated map of India, shading in its trademark saffron every state where it forms the government: 20 out of 28. When the map was complete, the entire torso of the country, from Gujarat and the Arabian sea in the west to the northeastern states and the Bay of Bengal in the east, was a lurid orange.

Two southern states continue to resist. In Kerala, voters tossed out the Communist Party of India (Marxist) and elected an alliance led by the Congress, the BJP’s old enemy. In itself, this was not remarkable; Kerala routinely cycles between the CPI (M) and the Congress. But the result marked the first time in nearly half a century that the Left will be entirely out of power across the country. In Tamil Nadu, a shock result: the Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam (DMK), a venerable party based on welfarist and anti-caste politics, lost to an upstart outfit founded just last year by a 51-year-old movie star.

In 2024, when Modi’s party failed to secure an outright majority in parliament, and had to rely on its alliance partners to stay in power, it was possible to imagine that the BJP was on the wane. But it has recovered, even as the regional parties that stood up to the BJP since it began its long stint in national government in 2014 – the Trinamool, the CPI (M), and the DMK – have been weakened or voted out. In the last 12 years, the BJP has rarely encountered an India so free of strong political opposition.

We spoke to Neelanjan Sircar, a political scientist at Ahmedabad University, about these results – and about the future of Hindutva.

Let’s start with the big result: West Bengal, where the BJP won 206 out of 294 assembly seats. How significant is that margin?

By vote share, we’re picking up a 5-percentage-point difference between the two parties – which is not small, but it’s not massive either. The mandate in terms of seats is massive, however. And the reason is that the BJP did well, consistently, even if a constituency had a moderate percentage of Muslims.

Which was unexpected. How did that happen?

The BJP has been the major opposition party in West Bengal since 2019, but it has never had a large operation in the state: no cadre of organised, Bengali-speaking party workers on the ground. In the cities, social media and other factors somewhat made up for that lack.. But if you travelled to rural areas, the BJP’s presence would disappear. And they had another challenge: how to swing the electoral arithmetic in their favour in a state that is 27% Muslim. So for these reasons, for several months heading into the election, the TMC looked to be a little bit ahead, despite a wave of anti-incumbency.

Around the country, though, and particularly in West Bengal, the BJP has used the Modi government’s machinery – investigative agencies, the paramilitary, the Election Commission – to show its presence, to demonstrate power. Even in Assam, for instance, the Election Commission may well have gerrymandered in favour of the BJP on a scale that we’ve never seen in India.

In parallel, the Modi government pushed through the Special Intensive Revision, which suddenly made millions of people ineligible to vote. This kind of exercise always has a disproportionate impact on vulnerable populations, who typically lack the kind of documentation required to stay on the voter list. What the Modi government added to this exercise in West Bengal was something called a test of logical discrepancy. What this meant was: if, because of some deficiency in your documents – say a mismatch in addresses, or some bureaucratic mess-up – you were thrown off the electoral rolls. But that then also threw your citizenship into doubt, and made you liable to detention on the grounds of being an illegal immigrant, which was a far more serious affair.

These rules were framed, but when you went on the ground, nobody could figure out how they’d been implemented. There was an enforced murkiness to the process – and that gave rise to rumour and polarisation between Hindus and Muslims. A far higher percentage of Muslims had at some point been thrown off the electoral rolls, or remained off the rolls due to logical discrepancy.

How did this lead to religious polarisation?

Well, for example: we went to one Muslim-dominated village in an area called Boshirhat, which had faced some religious riots about a decade ago. We heard all these totally unclear reasons for people being left off the electoral register: maybe the birth certificate was handwritten. When we went to a predominantly Hindu village nearby, nobody had been struck off . But one man said he’d heard that one of the Muslims thrown off the rolls in the first village had 600 children on the voter list, and someone else laughed and said, “I’d only heard 100,” and so on. “Were they Bangladeshis? Did they have illegal documents?” This was the kind of language being used.

So it created this sort of dynamic where Muslims were seen as illegal immigrants, and that helped the BJP.

That’s right. There was an empirical effect of people being cut from the rolls, but there was also the narrative that emerged from it. And it worked for the BJP because one strange feature of West Bengal is that the Muslim population is largely rural, whereas in the rest of India, they’re largely urban. During partition in 1947, urban, middle-class Bengali Muslims went to Bangladesh [then east Pakistan], so some 30% of the rural population is Muslim, while only about 19-20% of the urban population is Muslim.

Would the BJP have won without the SIR? Or is it just that its margin of victory wouldn’t have been as big?

Based on civil society reports, it does look like Muslims have been disproportionately targeted by the exercise, and sometimes in seats where that may have been relevant to an electoral outcome. But also: I spent quite a bit of time working in Muslim areas that had been hit badly by this process. And, you know, politics as basic politics – electoral politics, who’s winning, who’s losing – is the furthest thing from people’s minds. For them, this affects how they’re viewed as citizens: whether they’ll be detained, whether they’ll receive welfare. It’s existential. So it became difficult for the Trinamool to mobilise them as voters.

But it’s also true that the Trinamool was losing popularity quite quickly.

Yes, there was genuinely a lot of anti-incumbency. A lot of the local party organisation is very violent, very corrupt. One thing we’re starting to see in modern Indian politics is that its leaders are building parallel party structures. So, in the context of the Trinamool, [its leader] Mamata Banerjee used a political consultancy called I-PAC. [I-PAC builds political campaigns through grassroots outreach, digital media strategies and data analytics.] On the ground, people would ask you: “Are you from I-PAC?” As if it's a separate political organisation connected to the ruling party, separate from the Trinamool party workers.

The accountability link to the leader at the top now runs through I-PAC. What link do I have to my local political representative? That guy is only somebody who’s there for violence, who’s only there for mobilisation and corruption. This inability to develop organic links with local party organisations started to eat away at the image of the party at a very local level.

The same thing happened with the DMK in Tamil Nadu. You look at the DMK’s tenure: strong welfarism, good economic performance, and yet the chief minister MK Stalin lost his own seat. It’s an extraordinary outcome. There also, I-PAC worked with the DMK, and you had a lot of centralisation and these parallel leadership structures.

Kerala, Tamil Nadu and West Bengal were generally thought of the three big anti-BJP bastions. What does it mean now for the BJP and the country that one of them has fallen?

This is really a question about the Hindu nationalist project in the east of the country. Had I told you a little more than a decade ago that Orissa, Bihar, West Bengal and Assam, as a contiguous bloc of states, would all be controlled by the BJP, you’d have laughed at me. You had all these local leaders who looked unbeatable, you had regional undercurrents. And these are places we don’t traditionally associate with the northern and western Indian models of Hindu nationalism. And yet the BJP has penetrated, and winning West Bengal is the crown jewel. For all the BJP’s opponents, losing in West Bengal is a serious blow to your cultural imagination of what the line of defense against Hindu nationalism is.

Has Hindu nationalism itself transformed as it has tried to speak to this eastern bloc’s obsessions and anxieties? Or is it, at its core, still a north Indian cultural phenomenon as we knew it in 2014?

I think that’s what we’re going to find out. West Bengal and Assam are the two states with the highest Muslim populations in India right now. So for Hindutva to work in that context, you need extraordinarily high levels of Hindu-Muslim polarisation.

A decade ago, when we were studying Assam, it was seen as a state where you couldn’t pinpoint just one single faultline. There were divisions between Bengali and Assamese speakers, between the so-called tea tribes and mainlanders, between Hindus and Muslims, Bangladeshis and non-Bangladeshis. Now thanks to the BJP it has been completely flattened into: are you a Hindu or a Muslim? Again, we associate West Bengal with complicated cultural dynamics: the hills are different, the tribal areas are different, Kolkata is different. But we’re going to see the BJP attempt a similar social process, and we’ll have to see whether it works.

The last thing I would say about this is that people look at [the northern state of] Uttar Pradesh and say: this is the new model of Hindutva. I don’t think so. I think Assam and West Bengal are the tests. If you’re able to win in places that are more than a quarter, more than a third Muslim, using Hindu nationalism, then you’re really in a brave new world. Because then there’s nowhere you can lose.

What happened in Tamil Nadu?

I don’t think anybody saw this coming for the DMK. But we’ve seen in recent years some new parties capture the imagination of young, frustrated, upwardly mobile classes in very urban areas. The Aam Aadmi Party had these sweeping victories in Delhi and then Punjab, where you’d see 25-year-olds leave their investment banking job for a week to campaign for the party. By all accounts, the actor Vijay and his party seemed to have galvanised some of those same elements. The party was seen as a political lightweight, sure. But that energy in the face of frustrations with politics as usual worked for Vijay.

What I would say is that we’re seeing a more general phenomenon across the country, maybe across the world: an ability to win with anti-politics, by expressing a frustration with the status quo. You can see it from Donald Trump to the way that Vijay ran to the way that, you know, the Reform Party styles itself. These abstract notions of frustration with the conventional forms of politics – with appeasement, vote banks, all these terms you see even outside India – are starting to play out in India as well.

You could see the Tamil Nadu vote as an electoral version of the youth revolts in Nepal, Sri Lanka and Bangladesh: the same kind of youthful frustration at the political system.

Exactly. I recently spoke with a political scientist who reminded me: “There’s all this famous literature by Giovanni Sartori on anti-system politics. We need to go back and read it again.” For Sartori, an anti-system party was one that fundamentally stood against the political order in which it operates. When we read Sartori as graduate students, we had thought: “Yeah, that’s all gone, that’s some Cold War nonsense.” But now we need to figure out what this anti-system politics is. What are these parties of anti-system politics? Why are they winning everywhere all of a sudden?

One last question. Does the CPI (M)’s loss in Kerala, and its effacement from power everywhere, spell the end of the Left in India?

I have a contrarian view on this. I don’t know about the traditional left parties per se, but when you look at social and income inequalities in India, and you talk to people on the ground, the most common complaint is about the scale of those societal inequalities. It’s not hard to get people to say: look at these billionaires in our country, and look at us. When you look at the World Income Inequality Database, India has the same level of income inequality as Russia. India is one of the most unequal countries in the world. Much, much more unequal than the countries it aspires to be, in East Asia or Southeast Asia or Western Europe. Even the US, for all of its faults, has never seen the levels of inequality that India sees today.

So there is a class politics that is popular, but the left has not been able to tap into it. You see it rising up from time to time. When the farmers protested the new agricultural procurement laws in 2020, what was one of the first things they did? They blockaded shops run by [the billionaires] Mukesh Ambani and Gautam Adani. When we saw the protests following the leaks of examination papers for public service jobs in Uttar Pradesh, what was that? That was lower-middle-class people looking for employment in the government because they felt they had no other way out.

We know there are these issues, these class-based frustrations. At some point, I genuinely believe class politics will rear its head. It may be the traditional left, it might be another version of the left, it might be a new party, a charismatic leader. At some point, class politics will become genuinely politically salient, because you can’t keep on going like this. You’re not creating enough jobs, you’re simply not growing fast enough to serve the needs of an upwardly mobile lower-middle and middle-class population. And those frustrations will express themselves in a number of complicated ways.

A lot of people have written about this. Arvind Subramanian and Devesh Kapoor’s recent book A Sixth of Humanity talks about how the economy is stagnating. Thomas Piketty has written about it. I think it has been an academic exercise until now, but when I look on the ground and I see the levels of anger, I expect that in the next five to seven years this will become a genuine politics. Through what means, I cannot say.