Lost and found: On the 2026 Assembly elections

The results of the 2026 Assembly elections in Assam, West Bengal, Tamil Nadu, Kerala and Puducherry highlight several factors that have a bearing on India’s direction as a secular, democratic, federal republic. In Assam and Puducherry, the BJP and its partners retained power, while in the other three States, incumbents were swept away in a strong current of changed popular opinion. In Assam, for the first time, the BJP crossed the halfway mark of 64 seats on its own and, with its partners, won 101 seats in the 126-member Assembly. For the Congress, this is its worst performance — even lower than its 1985 tally in the aftermath of the Assam Agitation. The regional outfits that were part of the Congress-led alliance, including the Raijor Dal and Assam Jatiya Parishad, were routed, while those within the National Democratic Alliance (NDA) — chiefly the Asom Gana Parishad and the Bodoland People’s Front — managed to win a few seats, though they now have little clout given the BJP’s outright majority. Chief Minister Himanta Biswa Sarma has reinforced his position in the State through a mix of polarising communal rhetoric and redistribution schemes. Congress leader Gaurav Gogoi lost his own seat.

In West Bengal, the BJP has achieved a decisive victory through long-term planning, aided by the State’s political history, a tainted election process, and the exhaustion of the Trinamool Congress (TMC)’s politics that had run its course. Bengal has been home to India’s national movement and to Hindutva ideas long before they spread elsewhere, and has carried a strong sense of regional identity. The BJP, through years of meticulous organisation, converted a threshold population of the State to its totalising nationalist narrative. Having subsumed the regional politics of Maharashtra, Assam and Odisha, it had set its sights on West Bengal with obsessive determination, and has won. The TMC faces existential danger, with its founder-leader Mamata Banerjee at 71 and its cadre and voters now susceptible to pressure from the BJP. This election was also the most tainted in India’s elections: around 27 lakh people were arbitrarily removed from the electoral rolls, and the Supreme Court of India took an unhelpful view of that grave assault on the fundamentals of democracy. If that is the sign of things to come, it is cause for serious concern.