The BJP Scores Big in West Bengal

Welcome to Foreign Policy’s South Asia Brief. The highlights this week: India’s ruling Bharatiya Janata Party improves its position after significant state elections, Bangladesh closely watches the results in neighboring West Bengal, and India and Pakistan tensions remain high a year after their military conflict. Welcome to Foreign Policy’s South Asia Brief. The highlights this week: India’s ruling Bharatiya Janata Party improves its position after significant state elections, Bangladesh closely watches the results in neighboring West Bengal, and India and Pakistan tensions remain high a year after their military conflict. On Monday, votes were counted in five Indian states that held elections last week, and the results delivered a boost to the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP). In Kerala, the opposition Indian National Congress defeated a coalition of leftist parties. But the BJP significantly benefited from the outcomes everywhere else. In Assam, the ruling party maintained its hold on power in the state legislature, and it also triumphed in the union territory of Puducherry. In Tamil Nadu, a long-standing BJP rival—the regional Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam party—was stunned by a new party, Tamilaga Vettri Kazhagam. Led by an actor-turned-politician, the new party campaigned on an anti-corruption platform. The most significant result came in India’s fourth-most populous state, West Bengal, where the BJP won in a landslide over the incumbent All India Trinamool Congress (AITC) party. In doing so, it unseated its leader, Mamata Banerjee, one of Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s most formidable rivals. Banerjee has been chief minister of West Bengal for 15 years, three years longer than Modi has been premier. The BJP’s triumph is striking, given that voter turnout was estimated at a record high of nearly 93 percent. The BJP hasn’t ruled West Bengal at any time in the party’s 46-year history, and now it has a massive mandate to lead the government. The BJP’s victory in West Bengal, which saw the party take 207 of 294 seats, can be attributed to a range of factors, from economic distress to anti-incumbency sentiment. Opponents of the ruling party also point to a more controversial factor: the Indian Election Commission’s decision to remove 9 million voters from the state’s voter rolls, or nearly 12 percent of the electorate. Data shows that many of those removed are Muslims, who make up a core AITC constituency. Though New Delhi holds that the commission’s move is part of a nationwide effort to weed out ineligible voters, critics say that it is a BJP tactic to strengthen its electoral prospects. With these results, the BJP is in a much better place than it was two years ago, when it won a third straight term in national elections—but with a smaller majority than ever before. Since June 2024, Modi has governed in a coalition for the first time. This emboldened the opposition alliance, and Congress leader Rahul Gandhi formally took up the role of opposition leader. At the national level, government critics hoped that this opposition momentum could combine with rising anti-incumbency against the BJP—including voter unease about its Hindu nationalist agenda—and make the party vulnerable in the 2029 election. But gradually, the BJP has righted the ship. It won a handful of state elections in 2024 and 2025, paving the way for its performance in last week’s contests. The BJP has benefited as much from its wins as from its rivals’ losses. After all, West Bengal’s AITC and Tamil Nadu’s Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam are two of the major parties in the national opposition alliance. Now, that alliance is floundering, and the opposition will face familiar criticism: that it is unable to capitalize on the BJP’s vulnerabilities. The ruling party has suffered a few blows over the years: mass protests against controversial farm reforms and the Citizenship Amendment Act, a botched response to the COVID-19 pandemic, and persistent unemployment issues, to name a few. But this week, the BJP reasserted its status as a political juggernaut, and party leaders are brimming with confidence. It’s a long way to 2029, but barring a major shift, the BJP and Modi will be favored to win a fourth straight term—something that hasn’t been achieved in India’s postcolonial history. Bangladesh and West Bengal. Bangladesh, which borders West Bengal, watched the election results closely. Even in the best of times, cross-border issues have complicated India-Bangladesh ties. A BJP government in West Bengal will likely take a harder line than the AITC: For example, BJP leaders have accused Banerjee of enabling illegal immigration from Bangladesh. New leadership in West Bengal could also harm efforts on the part of the Bangladesh National Party government in Dhaka to patch up ties with New Delhi. The bilateral relationship has been rocky since the 2024 ouster of Bangladeshi Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina, who fled to India, where she rema

The BJP Scores Big in West Bengal

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The BJP Scores Big in West Bengal

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