Assembly poll results: How BJP-Modi domination impacts INDIA bloc nationally

Two years into his third term as Prime Minister, Narendra Modi couldn’t have asked for a more emphatic validation of the BJP’s continuing ascendancy. The BJP has finally conquered West Bengal, ending Trinamool Congress (TMC) chief Mamata Banerjee’s three-term reign. The party scored a third successive and as yet its biggest victory in Assam and piggybacked ally NR Congress to retain power in Pondicherry. And, for the first time ever, it bagged three seats in Kerala; a small electoral step that Modi is bound to exaggerate as BJP’s a giant southward leap.

There is, however, a still bigger prize that awaits Modi from these results. The crushing defeat of the DMK in Tamil Nadu and the Trinamool Congress in Bengal – topped up with chief ministers MK Stalin and Mamata Banerjee losing their own seats of Kolathur and Bhabanipur, respectively – strikes off two of Modi’s most vocal rivals from the Opposition-ruled states. Add to that the de-throning of Pinarayi Vijayan in Kerala and you have an INDIA bloc shorn off a troika of CMs that posed the stiffest resistance from Opposition-ruled states to every perceived assault by the Centre on federalism, national cohesion, constitutional rights and individual liberties.

BJP's 17 chief ministers

With Bengal in its kitty, the BJP will now have 17 chief ministers. In four other states and the Union Territory of Pondicherry, the party is a partner in power. If speculations in Delhi’s power corridors are to be believed, the party could soon add another state to this list where a restive senior ally is on the verge of severing ties with the Congress and other INDIA bloc parties.

Also read: Bengal polls: Mamata’s refusal to resign sparks a constitutional crisis

For the INDIA bloc, the results brought a wave of Monday morning blues that won’t end in a day. The ramifications of the loss won’t be confined to Assam, Bengal or Tamil Nadu. They’ll be national.

The decimation of the DMK, the Trinamool and the Left comes at a time when other regional rivals of the BJP have been utterly diminished. Lalu Prasad Yadav’s RJD was routed in Bihar last October and has failed repeatedly for nearly two decades to make any sustainable gains in the Lok Sabha. The ailing Sharad Pawar’s NCP has been broken into two and despite a sterling performance in the 2024 Lok Sabha polls, his faction was reduced to rubble in the Maharashtra Assembly polls held months later. Ditto for Uddhav Thackeray’s Shiv Sena.

The political foundation of Arvind Kejriwal’s AAP was uprooted in Delhi last January and though the party continues to hold power in Punjab, the recent en masse defection by seven of its 10 Rajya Sabha MPs to the BJP portends an impending implosion of the party. The once combative Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP) supremo Mayawati has chosen perennial political servility to the BJP.

Mamata refuses to resign

If the Modi-Amit Shah template of the past decade is anything to go by, it won’t be long before attempts to poach, discredit, intimidate or incarcerate leaders from the DMK and the Trinamool are pushed into top gear as a bid to isolate Stalin and Mamata within their parties. With the protection that power gave them now stripped by their poll losses, Stalin and Mamata are fair game for Modi’s vendetta.

Also read: Opposition deficit, rather than BJP triumph, is the message

Stalin has, for now, chosen to keep his own counsel; expectedly stunned in equal measure by the DMK’s defeat and his own and, perhaps, awaiting a swift ‘betrayal’ from allies, including the Congress, who are eager to support a TVK-led alliance for a slice of power that the DMK refused to share with them whenever in government. Mamata, forever the stormy petrel of Indian politics, remains defiant; refusing even to tender her resignation as chief minister following a mandate that she has dubbed as one “stolen by the BJP”.

The INDIA bloc’s cohesion had fractured soon after the Lok Sabha polls concluded. The AAP walked out of the Opposition coalition slamming the Congress. The TMC, which was anyway part of the bloc only in name as it chose to remain a solo player in Bengal, kept the alliance unsteady at the national level with its frequent taunts at the Congress leadership. The National Conference (NC) seemed more eager in establishing a ‘working relationship’ with the Centre the moment Omar Abdullah returned as chief minister of Jammu and Kashmir than to strengthen strained ties with the Congress. The Congress’ mounting debacles in a series of Assembly polls held after the Lok Sabha elections only exacerbated tensions within the bloc.

UDF win saves INDIA bloc humiliation

The bloc’s unity had already become conditional on issues of common concern that they could corner the Centre on; visible mostly during Parliament sessions and occasionally beyond them. The current lot of Assembly poll results threatens to disintegrate the bloc further if the Congress party indeed severs ties with the DMK to join a TVK-led government in Tamil Nadu.

As the largest constituent of the INDIA bloc and the only one that can, despite its shrinking electoral footprint, call itself the BJP’s national alternative, the role of the Congress and particularly of Lok Sabha’s Leader of Opposition Rahul Gandhi in this unravelling is bound to come under intense scrutiny and reprimand by its allies.

Also read: Vijay doesn't have to 'prove' his majority since Constitution never asked him to

The victory of the Congress-led United Democratic Front (UDF) in Kerala may have saved the INDIA bloc from the humiliation of a complete wipeout in the just concluded polls but it’s a triumph earned not at the expense of the NDA but of the Left Democratic Front (LDF); an INDIA bloc constituent nationally, which Rahul attacked bitterly during the Kerala campaign provoking equally caustic retorts from Vijayan.

The Trinamool won’t forget easily Rahul’s infelicitous choice of directly accusing Mamata in the middle of the Bengal campaign of preparing favourable conditions for the BJP’s expansion in the state with her “communal politics”. In the aftermath of the BJP’s stunning Bengal win, Rahul has tried to gloss over the acrimonious tenor of his rhetoric with statesmanlike commiserations for the embattled Trinamool chief. He has backed Mamata’s claim about “more than 100 seats” being “stolen” from her party by the BJP and even appealed to “some in the Congress, and others” who are “gloating about TMC’s loss” to “put petty politics aside”.

The Trinamool chief may have responded with uncharacteristic calm to the Congress’ supposed peace-offering but it remains to be seen whether she truly forgets and forgives Rahul’s malapropos charge if and when she overcomes her state of denial over the TMC’s crushing defeat.

Will Congress dump DMK and support TVK?

What the Congress would struggle to shrug off most, however, would be the slight it would cause Stalin if it indeed dumps the DMK to align with Vijay’s TVK. Such a political somersault is bound to have repercussions for the INDIA bloc if allies begin to latch on to the DMK’s “backstabbing” charge now being hurled at the Congress. The Congress can couch its move as one aimed at preventing Vijay from allying with the NDA to form the new Tamil Nadu government or even brazen it out by accusing the DMK of taking its support for granted whenever their alliance ruled the southern state by denying the party a slice of the power pie.

Yet, in popular perception, it would be difficult for the Congress to live down its move as one that doesn’t reek of political expediency and opportunism. Worse, a break-up with the DMK will substantially deplete the INDIA bloc’s collective strength in Parliament.

Stalin’s party has eight Rajya Sabha MPs and 22 Lok Sabha MPs, who have, thus far, been among the Congress’s most bankable colleagues in taking on the BJP when Opposition MPs from the TMC, the AAP or even the Samajwadi Party (SP) and NCP-SP have disagreed with the Congress’s floor strategy. These widening fissures in Opposition unity will only embolden the BJP further to bulldoze its litany of contentious legislation with far-reaching political implications through Parliament in the three years that remain of Modi’s current term in power.

For Modi, this is a gold mine he’d be only too glad to exploit. Isolating the Congress from its allies has been the defining theme of Modi’s relentless attacks on the INDIA bloc. The Congress’s anticipated moves in Tamil Nadu and Rahul’s inability to navigate the labyrinth of fragile egos of his allies, several of whom are no fans of his assumed centrality within the INDIA bloc or of his performance as the Lok Sabha’s LoP, make Modi’s work easier.

Had the Congress been electorally buoyant and its organisation even half as vigilant, efficient and aggressive as the BJP’s, it could have hoped to usurp, in time, the electoral space being created by atrophying INDIA bloc partners. With all available and foreseeable evidence to the contrary, that’s now a void the BJP would seek to fill as it has just done in Bengal.