The Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) will win both Tamil Nadu and West Bengal in the elections scheduled for 2026, Home Minister Amit Shah said while speaking at a meeting in Madurai on Monday. The election cycle, which will see Tamil Nadu and West Bengal going to the polls in 2026, will also include Assam and Kerala among the major states. While the BJP has ruled Assam since 2016, Kerala, Tamil Nadu and West Bengal are the only three major states
- Principal opposition, junior partner in an opposition alliance and a distant third: BJP’s situation in West Bengal, Tamil Nadu and KeralaThe BJP had a seat share of 26.19%, 1.71% and zero respectively in the 2021 assembly elections, which were held in West Bengal, Tamil Nadu and Kerala. While it recorded its best ever performance in West Bengal, it did better (even if only marginally so ) in Tamil Nadu and Kerala than in previous elections. As things stand , the BJP is the principal opposition party in West Bengal, has course-corrected in Tamil Nadu to resurrect its alliance with the All India Anna Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam (AIADMK) and is still struggling as a distant third in the state of Kerala.
- BJP’s successes and failures in these three states are best described as an ideological coup d’état versus a cul-de-sacThe BJP winning 18 parliamentary constituencies (PCs) in the 2019 Lok Sabha elections in West Bengal was among the most stunning surprises in India’s political history. It had a vote share and seat share of just 16.8% and 4.76% in the 2014 Lok Sabha election in Bengal, which plummeted to just 10.2% and 1.02% in the 2016 assembly elections in the state. Almost all of the BJP’s gains came at the cost of the Communist Party of India (Marxist) or CPI (M) led Left Front which collapsed to a vote share of just 6.7% in 2019 compared to 25.2% in 2014. Such mass desertion from a communist party to a right-wing party made West Bengal a big ideological victory for the BJP. In Tamil Nadu and Kerala, however, it is ideology which has become the bane of BJP’s existence. BJP’s aggressive posturing against Dravidian politics in Tamil Nadu led to its decimation in the 2021 assembly and 2024 Lok Sabha elections. That the BJP has gone back to allying with the AIADMK against the Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam led government shows that it has realized its mistake in waging an ideological battle against the Dravidian parties. Similarly, in Kerala, the BJP has seen its primary national adversary, the Congress, stealing the gains of issues such as the Sabarimala temple entry issue, which should have accrued to the BJP. Unless the Congress-CPI(M) bipolarity ends in Kerala, the BJP has no hope of breaking ground in the state.
- Demography poses its own challenge to the BJP in all of these statesBJP’s core electoral strategy is about consolidation of Hindu votes in an election. Both West Bengal and Kerala are ill-suited to this kind of a strategy. According to the 2011 census, Muslims accounted for 27.01% of West Bengal’s population. The latest National Family and Health Survey (NFHS) puts this number at 28.3%. The BJP’s best ever vote share performance in West Bengal (40.3% in the 2019 Lok Sabha election), would have involved a consolidation of 70% Hindu votes in the state, assuming Muslims did not vote for the BJP. In any other state, such a consolidation would have led to a landslide victory. Similarly, in Kerala, Hindus have a share of just 54.7% in the state’s population according to the 2011 census. Here, the BJP faces the challenge of weaning most of them away from the CPI (M) while both Christians and Muslims are known to vote for the Congress in bigger numbers. In Tamil Nadu, despite the proportion of Muslims being among the lowest across major Indian states, the key to power lies through OBC consolidation, and these classes are already divided among the two Dravidian parties. BJP’s ideological moorings in the state have often been seen as upper caste which has made it a pariah of sorts in the state. Whether this changes with the renewal of the alliance with the AIADMK and the BJP having an OBC state president remains to be seen.
Roshan Kishore is the Data and Political Economy Editor at Hindustan Times. He heads the newsroom's data journalism team, which produces Number Theory, a daily data-driven feature for the print edition and the HT app. Number Theory uses data analysis and story-telling based on it to add value to the newsroom’s daily coverage by putting stories in a larger context on a range of issues, including politics, macroeconomy, markets, global affairs and climate. Under his leadership HT’s data journalism work has established itself as a niche product in Indian journalism and pushed the boundaries of marrying academic rigour with news sense and speed. Along with writing and editing data stories, he has also been writing a weekly political economy column called Terms of Trade for HT Premium. A trained economist with an MPhil degree from Jawaharlal Nehru University, Kishore has also been a visiting fellow at the Centre for Advanced Studies of India (CASI) at the University of Pennsylvania. Along with his journalistic work, his writings have also appeared in journals such as the Economic and Political Weekly and working papers for CASI and UNESCAP.
Nishant Ranjan has been working as a data journalist with Hindustan Times since 2023. In this short period, he has established a niche for creating original datasets and utilising them to produce journalistic work that pushes the boundaries of journalism. The list of datasets and stories done by him include the following: a dataset of all 717 chief ministers India has had since 1952, a dataset of all 3,350 members of India’s council of ministers, a dataset of all 190 deputy chief ministers in India and a dataset of all 279 Supreme Court judges in India (1950-2025). He has also profiled each elected Muslim MLA/MP since 1952. He is a mining engineer by training who decided to pursue a Master's in Development Studies from TISS after working in a coal mine for 10 months. He also worked as a research associate at the Centre for Policy Research, researching local governance in India. He also has a keen interest in analyzing electoral politics and political executives in India.