6 min readAug 7, 2026 06:22 AM IST
First published on: Aug 6, 2026 at 06:04 PM IST
Politics can sometimes change in a week much more than it does over many months. After the BJP’s disappointing 2024 Lok Sabha results were followed by big wins in several state assembly elections, it looked like Indian politics was heading toward one-party dominance. But between July 20 and August 3, the focus shifted from the opposition’s weakness to the BJP’s vulnerabilities.
On July 30, the Lok Sabha passed the Prevention of Insults to National Honour (Amendment) Bill granting Vande Mataram the same statutory protection the national anthem has enjoyed since 1971. A symbolic victory for the Hindutva movement arrived in a week that belonged, completely, to India’s youth. Five days earlier, Union Education Minister Dharmendra Pradhan had stepped down after protests led by the Cockroach Janta Party (CJP) at Jantar Mantar in Delhi. This kind of political reversal is rare in Narendra Modi’s third term, and it was led by people, many of whom were too young to have voted in 2014.
The political aftershocks did not stop in Delhi. Days later, the BJP lost Bankipur – one of its safest urban constituencies in Bihar which has been represented by the BJP’s national president or his family members for nearly three decades. Six months after Prashant Kishor’s Jan Suraaj was dismissed as an electoral experiment, it captured precisely the kind of affluent, upper-caste, urban seat that should have remained comfortably with the BJP. By-elections are imperfect predictors of broader political trends. Yet, given the wider political context, dismissing the significance of the Bankipur result altogether would risk overlooking an important signal.
After the BJP’s big win in West Bengal, the Trinamool Congress came apart. Seven Rajya Sabha MPs from the Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) had joined the BJP a few months earlier. The party also got its own chief minister in Bihar for the first time in April, and there was another split in the Shiv Sena (UBT) in June 2026.
How do we understand the sudden change of the last two weeks? Does the rise of CJP show that there is now an opening in India’s political scene?
Youth-led movements have recently changed politics in South Asian countries – Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, and Nepal. While a similar regime change is unlikely in India, it would be a mistake to ignore the feelings of a digitally connected generation. This generation is growing impatient with governments that seem unable to provide opportunities. The 2026 Tamil Nadu election may have been the first sign of this shift.
Joseph Vijay’s Tamilaga Vettri Kazhagam (TVK) won in a way that traditional ways of understanding Indian elections can’t fully explain. His party swept much of urban Tamil Nadu, especially Greater Chennai, even though it lacked the usual organisation, support of caste networks, or ideological orientation that often lead to electoral victories. Post-election surveys showed that younger voters were much more likely to support TVK than older people. Most said their main reason was simple: Change. It seems the DMK and AIADMK were still using ideas meant for a more rural Tamil Nadu.
On the face of it, a student protest in Delhi and a film star winning an election in Tamil Nadu might seem unrelated. But both show the same trend: A generation looking for leaders who can bring change. While India’s youth population is starting to stabilise, the mix of being young, urban, with college degrees and digitally connected is something new. Such voters organise through social media, vote almost as much as older generations, and judge governments based on their hopes for the future rather than on old political loyalties.
What links Jantar Mantar and Chennai is that India’s cities are growing faster than its politics can keep up with. Half the population is under 30. Twice in one summer, established parties were defeated when outfits and movements spoke to young people. There is a tough lesson for all political parties here.
The Opposition must understand that echoing the old grammar of caste and class grievances would mean that the beneficiary of such discontent could be a completely new political entrepreneur. The current Opposition might pick up a few more seats and, at best, will get a chance to cobble together a weak coalition. Opposition leadership must produce a vision of the future that is far more than a ledger of past injuries or a list of promises to particular groups.
For the BJP, the challenge is even more profound. Its extraordinary rise after 2014 rested on convincing millions of first-generation aspirational Indians that tomorrow would be better than yesterday. The CJP protests suggest that this promise is no longer believable. The party is increasingly speaking to those who agree with it, and even some of them may be defecting as the Bankipur results indicate. The Jantar Mantar protestors too came from the constituency which Modi’s BJP has drawn heavily upon.
Today the BJP looks more like what it was before becoming the party of aspiring India: A right-wing conservative party speaking for a particular slice of middle-aged Hindu India. As the party starts planning for the 2029 general election, it faces a challenge that all long-ruling parties eventually meet. By then, it will have spent 15 years in power at the Centre. The benefits of being in office slowly turn into the problems of governing. This leaves the party with few options: It must either renew itself or keep shrinking back to its core supporters. As one longtime RSS and BJP affiliate told us, if the party wants to avoid another setback like 2024 – even or worse – in 2029, it needs its own Kamaraj Plan, like when senior Congress leaders resigned in 1963 to rebuild their party.
The events of the last two weeks may not be enough to predict what will happen in 2029. But they are important enough to raise a question the BJP cannot ignore. The generation that brought Narendra Modi to power in 2014 is not the same as the one joining the electorate now. The BJP’s real challenge is not just to win over young Indians, but to show them it can offer the most believable promises for a better future.
Chhibber is Professor of Political Science and Indo-American Community Chair in India Studies at the University of California, Berkeley, US. Verma is Fellow at Centre for Policy Research (CPR), New Delhi. Views are personal
Does the rise of CJP show that there is now an opening in India's political scene? (File Photo) 
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