BJP lead in Bengal and DMK’s crushing defeat test state-identity challenge to Hindutva
A new electoral map is taking shape. Monday’s results left the Bharatiya Janata Party with a significant lead over the Trinamool Congress in West Bengal and saw the Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam suffer a crushing defeat in Tamil Nadu — developments that call into question whether federal and linguistic identities remain Hindutva’s strongest foil.
Until the 1980s, it was difficult to imagine a Hindutva party in power given the centrality of secularism in Indian political life. Over the past four decades, however, the BJP has worked assiduously to wipe out that ideology. With secularism nearly dead by the 1990s and 2000s, federalism and state-based identity emerged as the party’s main ideological opponent in the Modi era.
The states posed both electoral and ideological hurdles. During much of the past decade, the BJP dominated at the Union level but faced sharper headwinds in state contests. An analysis covering 2018 to 2020 found the party’s vote share fell markedly in state elections compared with the 2019 Lok Sabha polls, suggesting Narendra Modi was a far stronger vote-getter nationally than in state arenas.
Bengal became the principal battleground in this clash. Founded in 1998, the Trinamool Congress initially showed little fidelity to any ideology, let alone Bengali nationalism. That changed ahead of the 2021 Assembly elections, when the party embraced Bengali identity as a counter to Hindutva.
The move, late and never fully wholehearted, nevertheless helped the Trinamool fend off a strong BJP challenge in 2021. Faced with that terrain, the BJP avoided taking on Bengali nationalism head-on.
Instead, its strategy in the current election was to persuade voters that their identity would not be challenged — a message illustrated, sometimes comically, by candidates campaigning with dead fish to signal that everyday Bengali life would remain undisturbed.
The party’s nods to Bengali identity are almost certainly tactical; if it were to form a government in the state, it is highly likely it would principally rule using the strategies and goals of its founding ideology, Hindutva. In Tamil Nadu, meanwhile, the DMK’s defeat marks a massive setback for Dravidian politics, whose core has long been opposition to North Indian hegemony and the imposition of Hindi.
The outcome undercuts one of the most durable state-based ideological counters to Hindutva. Given the election results on Monday, the erosion of federal and linguistic identity as an effective brake on the BJP now appears possible. Whether this moment signals a lasting shift will hinge on how state-based parties recalibrate — and whether the BJP’s tactical embrace of regional identities endures beyond the campaign trail.