What Modi’s big win in Indian state elections could mean for its democracy

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For the first time in its 46-year history, Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) has won the state of West Bengal, arguably the Hindu nationalist party’s most consequential victory since 2014, the year Modi first came to power.

The legislative assembly elections were held on several dates in April in West Bengal, three other Indian states – Tamil Nadu, Assam and Kerala – as well as in the federally-governed territory of Puducherry.

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The BJP retained Assam for a third consecutive term, while the coalition it is a part of also returned to power in Puducherry. The southern state of Tamil Nadu saw the rise of yet another film star, following in the state’s long tradition of cine icons turning into mass political leaders. Actor Joseph Vijay broke the stranglehold of two long-dominant state parties with a fledgling political outfit and is poised to become the next chief minister.

In neighbouring Kerala, a communist government lost to its traditional rival, an Indian National Congress-led alliance – a familiar election cycle in the state, which also marks the first time in 50 years that the left is not in control of any Indian state.

But while each of these votes matters — and we’ll return to them — the West Bengal outcome represents the biggest takeaway from Monday’s verdict.

A history that has defined India

Bengal is where the story of Indian colonialism began after the Battle of Plassey in the mid-18th century, when the British East India Company defeated the Nawab of Bengal, transforming from a trading firm into the sword arm of British imperialism in South Asia.

Some 150 years later, the British partitioned Bengal in 1905 – the first major instance of division along religious lines in modern South Asia. By separating the largely Muslim eastern regions from the Hindu-majority western districts, Lord Curzon, the then British viceroy, established a template in which religious identity could be mapped onto a territory and then mobilised politically.

Although annulled in 1911, the partition of Bengal catalysed a new political consciousness in the region that took various forms during the anticolonial movement, producing national figures of all hues, including several Hindu nationalist ideologues, the most prominent of them being Shyama Prasad Mukherjee, founder of the BJP’s precursor, the Bharatiya Jan Sangh.

Mukherjee founded the Jan Sangh two years before his death in 1953 to advocate for a culturally united India. He opposed a special status granted to the Indian-administered Kashmir after India and Pakistan emerged as independent nations in 1947. Modi fulfilled Mukherjee’s dream by scrapping the disputed region’s partial autonomy weeks after coming into power for a second term in 2019.

Addressing his party workers on Monday night, Modi said the West Bengal win “would bring peace to his [Mukherjee’s] soul”.

But despite its history of religious cleavages, Bengal displayed a much more complex post-independence political trajectory. It elected a communist government in 1977, which remained in power for a record 34 consecutive years before the Trinamool Congress (TMC), a centrist party led by the now-outgoing Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee, brought it down in 2011.

The state also remained relatively peaceful during some of the most tumultuous periods in modern India.

In 1984, anti-Sikh riots erupted in many states following the assassination of Prime Minister Indira Gandhi by her Sikh bodyguards. An estimated 3,000 Sikhs were killed in the national capital, New Delhi. West Bengal remained peaceful. Eight years later, the state again remained a sanctuary from the nationwide bloodbath that erupted following the 1992 demolition of a Mughal-era mosque in Uttar Pradesh state by Hindu hardliners led by Modi’s party.

Will that sense of communal exceptionalism and relative harmony that has long characterised West Bengal remain intact under a BJP government? That is one of the big questions emerging from the election results.

‘Lotus has bloomed’ — the question is how

West Bengal is home to nearly 100 million people, 27 percent of them Muslims. The BJP, riding on a combination of anti-incumbency sentiment against Banerjee and its own tried-and-tested anti-Muslim rhetoric, won a stunning 207 seats, reducing the TMC to 80 legislators in the 294-member assembly – a remarkable rise for a party that until a decade ago had just three seats.

“The lotus has bloomed in West Bengal!” Modi posted on X on Monday afternoon, referring to the BJP’s election symbol, even as Election Commission of India (ECI) officials were still counting the votes. He called it a “historic victory”, which “will remain unforgettable”, promising a “politics of good governance” in the state.

The ECI, an autonomous constitutional body led by government-appointed bureaucrats, has faced severe scrutiny and criticism since 2014, with opposition parties and electoral watchdogs accusing it of vote theft, fraud, manipulation, and, more recently, of a controversial revision of electoral rolls that denied some 2.7 million people their voting rights in West Bengal.

The ECI denies the allegations, but an analysis of voter deletions in West Bengal by SABAR Institute, a Kolkata-based independent research organisation, showed that Muslims were disproportionately affected, mainly in districts where they constitute a high percentage of the population and could have swayed the election.

According to political commentator Yogendra Yadav, the deletion of 2.7 million votes amounts to 4.3 percent of votes cast in West Bengal, in an election where the BJP’s lead over the TMC was about 5 percent.

“The question is inescapable: If these 27 lakh [2.7 million] persons were allowed to vote, how would it have affected the outcome?” he asked in a column for the Indian Express newspaper on Tuesday, urging the opposition to stop legitimising “curated election results” that raise questions on the integrity of electoral processes.

Banerjee, who stunningly lost her own seat, alleged the BJP “looted more than 100 seats”. “The Election Commission is the BJP’s commission,” she told reporters in Kolkata, the state capital, promising to “bounce back”.

Will BJP follow the Assam model in Bengal?

The BJP’s historic win in West Bengal follows a familiar election strategy, in which stirring up anti-Muslim sentiments is a central pillar.

In their campaign speeches, its leaders, including Modi, accused Muslims of being “Bangladeshi infiltrators” as the party called for a Hindu consolidation to drive out the “illegal immigrants” from the state. As the BJP takes West Bengal, fears of a crackdown on allegedly “illegal” Muslim residents will be more pervasive.

In a state famous for its roadside food stalls offering a wide range of fish and meat, including beef, delicacies, an insistence on and promotion of vegetarianism is difficult to rule out. BJP-led governments in several other states have tried to enforce rules around the sale and consumption of meat, especially beef.

Only fish is likely to be an exception. A hardcore staple for both Hindus and Muslims, fish is not just a protein source in West Bengal; it is also an integral marker of Bengali culture, with marriages and even religious rituals performed with it. To ward off people’s fears about the BJP policing their food choices if it wins the election, many party leaders were seen campaigning with a fish in hand.

Modi appeared to have such fears in mind when he thanked the people of West Bengal on Monday for electing the BJP.

“Our double-engine government will ensure equal opportunities and respect for all sections of society,” Modi posted on X, using a media-coined term, implying a political and administrative continuity between New Delhi and the BJP-ruled states that, according to the party, accelerates the formulation and implementation of government policies and prioritises their development.

But Modi has often promised to work for “all sections of society”. His successful 2014 election campaign was built on the slogan “Sabka Saath, Sabka Vikas”, which translates to “Support for all, development for all”.

On the ground, though, it is a very different kind of “double-engine” government that the BJP has delivered in several states — and one, in neighbouring Assam in particular, offers a glimpse of what could await West Bengal.

Assam and West Bengal share 263km (163-mile) and 2,216km (1,377-mile) borders, respectively, with Bangladesh, a Muslim-majority country that declared its independence from Pakistan – with India’s military help – in 1971.

Long before colonial cartographers divided the subcontinent into its modern nation-states, people from present-day Bangladesh had been migrating to what is now Assam to work in its rice fields and tea estates.

Today, one-third of Assam’s 31 million residents are Muslim, the largest percentage among Indian states, a majority of them having historically migrated to the northeastern state in waves. These Bengali-origin Muslims, pejoratively called “miyas”, have been the target of xenophobic campaigns for decades that the BJP has championed since coming to power in the state in 2016.

With 102 seats in the 126-member Assam assembly, Chief Minister Himanta Biswa Sarma has returned with a larger majority than in 2021. The emphatic victory is likely to see a more hardline Sarma doubling down on his attacks on Muslims. The last five years saw him and his government demonising the community as “infiltrators”, evicting them from their lands and demolishing homes.

A controversial gerrymandering exercise turned the state’s large Muslim voter base much less influential than it was previously. Of the 19 legislators from the opposition Congress who won in Assam, 18 are Muslim – a stark indication of the religious polarisation in the state.

Sarma promised a more virulent crackdown in his campaign speeches this year, pledging to “break the backbones” of “illegal Bangladeshi Muslims”. He has committed to implementing a Uniform Civil Code, a polarising proposal that replaces religion-based personal laws. The BJP, in its manifesto, has also promised to pass laws related to the alleged forced religious conversion of people, and on the so-called “love jihad”, an unsubstantiated right-wing conspiracy theory that accuses Muslim men of entrapping Hindu women into marriages in order to convert them to Islam.

Beyond West Bengal

The southern state of Tamil Nadu — one of India’s most developed — threw up a surprise.

The state has a long history of film stars turning into politicians. Actor Vijay, who launched the Tamilaga Vettri Kazhagam (TVK) party only two years ago, trounced the ruling Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam (DMK)-led alliance by winning 108 seats in the 234-member assembly. Like West Bengal’s Banerjee, state Chief Minister MK Stalin also lost his seat – a shock defeat for a leader whose government is credited with making Tamil Nadu the fastest growing economy in India at an impressive rate of 11 percent.

Vijay’s rise breaks a decades-long duopoly of Tamil Nadu’s two main Dravidian parties, which derive their names from a powerful movement against caste inequalities. The two Dravidian parties had also opposed attempts by north Indian-dominated parties to impose Hindi – and its accompanying so-called upper-caste Hindu values – on the non-Hindi speaking southern states.

However, the 51-year-old actor is 10 seats short of a simple majority mark of 118 in the Tamil Nadu assembly and needs allies to form the government. According to media reports, the Congress and other regional parties are likely to join his government.

In neighbouring Kerala, which boasts of developmental indices better than those of the United States, a familiar oscillation of power happened. The communist government led by Chief Minister Pinarayi Vijayan lost to an alliance led by the Congress, which won 101 of the 140 seats. Muslims, who, like West Bengal, form about 27 percent of the state’s population, won one-fourth of the seats, including a first-time female MLA from the Indian Union Muslim League (IUML).

Despite trying for decades, Modi’s BJP has not been able to make a significant dent in Kerala and Tamil Nadu. But even in those two states, the BJP’s vote percentage continues to rise.

The BJP, with Modi as prime minister, has long faced accusations of backing crony capitalism. However, the party denies those claims. What is indisputable, though, is that billionaires seen as being close to the prime minister have won rights to more and more land, forests and mines in recent years.

With Monday’s results, the BJP’s consolidation of power has grown. The party now governs or is part of the governing coalition in 21 of the country’s 28 states. These states now make up nearly 80 percent of India’s 1.4 billion people – a phenomenon last seen in the 1960s when the Congress was at the peak of its power.

Critics often call the BJP an “election machine”, with a total income of $712m, compared with nearly $96m for its closest national rival, the Congress, according to an assessment by the election watchdog Association of Democratic Reforms in 2025. “It’s a race between a Ferrari and a bicycle,” as writer and activist Arundhati Roy had once said.

Now that the “machine” has delivered one of the most significant results in India’s recent electoral history, the state election results strengthen Modi midway through his third term. However, they also raise serious questions about whether India is turning more authoritarian. Is it moving towards one-party dominance? And will elections in the world’s most populous democracy be free and fair any more?