As BJP expands and regional parties shrink, is Indian politics entering a new phase?

However, regional forces can no longer be complacent about their ability to defeat the BJP, which has now defeated major regional players such as the Trinamool Congress (TMC), the Aam Aadmi Party (AAP), and the Biju Janata Dal (BJD) in the last two years, even while losing the Jharkhand Assembly election in late 2024 to the Jharkhand Mukti Morcha (JMM). Jharkhand now remains the sole eastern state keeping the BJP out of power.

Going forward, this poses a new set of challenges to the Opposition that has been voicing federal concerns, the misuse of agencies against political rivals, the Centre purportedly not releasing funds, and the will of Delhi being imposed on states. For such issues to gain traction, people in states need to respond to these issues, strengthening the states vis-à-vis the Centre. But if voters stop responding to these issues, not only do the issues die, but regional parties risk facing an existential crisis.

The more the BJP does well against regional forces, the more the state appears unitary and driven by a single impulse. The victory is not of the BJP alone but of the Jana Sangh-BJP’s foundational idea of “one nation, one culture”, which makes the regional parties seem weaker, barring the few who have successfully resisted the BJP’s electoral advances.

A string of victories

The latest victory over a major regional party has come in West Bengal, where the party ended the Trinamool Congress’s (TMC) 15-year run in power in an election marked by acrimony, allegations of manipulation, and held under the shadow of the Special Intensive Revision (SIR) of electoral rolls. While the TMC tried to make the election an insider-versus-outsider contest — central to the language of regional politics — the BJP successfully defeated it on the planks of law and order, violence by TMC workers, misgovernance, corruption, and through Hindu consolidation. The R G Kar hospital rape and murder incident became a key marker of the purportedly violent politics under the Left and had the kind of impact that the anti-land acquisition movements in Singur and Nandigram had in the 2011 polls. The TMC has now been reduced to 80 seats in the 294-member House (the election in the constituency of Falta in South 24 Parganas will be held on May 21).

Last year, the BJP unseated the AAP from power in Delhi, winning 48 of 70 seats. While technically the AAP is a national party, it was born in Delhi and had been the most powerful in the city since 2015. Like Mamata Banerjee, AAP chief Arvind Kejriwal also lost his own election and his party was swept aside amid allegations of corruption, creaking infrastructure in the city, and allegations of profligate spending on the Chief Minister’s residence.

A year earlier, the BJP won Odisha, ending BJD leader and former ally Naveen Patnaik’s 24-year run as CM. The BJP won 78 of the 147 Assembly seats and Mohan Chandra Majhi was made the CM. While Patnaik was popular, there was some fatigue against him among voters and the rise of his key aide V K Pandian, an IAS officer seen as an outsider, did not go down well with the people. In the Lok Sabha polls held simultaneously with the Assembly polls, the BJP won 20 out of 21 seats, with the Congress bagging one and the BJD failing to open its account.

In this period, the only two places where the BJP could not defeat a regional player are the tribal-dominated Jharkhand, where the Hemant Soren-led JMM returned to power, and the Union Territory of Jammu and Kashmir, where the BJP is strong only in Hindu-majority Jammu. Based on the backing from the electorate in Jammu, the BJP emerged as the second-largest party after the National Conference, with 29 seats.

Between 2014 and 2024

In the Assembly elections between 2014 and 2024, the BJP did better in direct fights with the Congress than against the major regional parties. It wrested Haryana from the Congress for the first time in 2014, largely on the back of the Modi wave, and has maintained its grip on the state since then. It has been able to carve out a large non-Jat base in the state, while the Congress has become associated with the dominant caste, the Jats, because of Bhupinder Singh Hooda.

The BJP also defeated the Congress convincingly in Assam in 2016 and has since maintained its dominance in the state. In the recent election, the BJP won an absolute majority on its own for the first time, while the Congress plummeted to its worst-ever performance. The Assamese concern about the increasing presence of Bengali-speaking Muslims leading to demographic changes and culture has fused seamlessly with the BJP’s long-standing pitch against illegal Bangladeshi Muslim immigration.

States such as Rajasthan, Madhya Pradesh, Chhattisgarh, Himachal Pradesh, and Uttarakhand have alternated between the BJP and the Congress in direct fights in the Assembly elections. However, the BJP has been clearly stronger than the Congress in all of these states in the Lok Sabha polls since 2014, though the Grand Old Party managed to do well in direct contests in Maharashtra in 2024, and dented the ruling party in Haryana and Rajasthan. But since then, the Opposition party has not been able to repeat this performance. The BJP-led alliance has also managed to get the better of regional parties such as Shiv Sena (UBT) and NCP (SP) in Maharashtra, depleting them electorally after having engineered the splits in the parties.

However, despite winning the 2014 and 2019 Lok Sabha polls, the party had failed to shake the major regional players, except in Uttar Pradesh, where it won in 2017 and 2022, leaving the Samajwadi Party (SP) and the Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP) behind. Now, the others, too, have been successfully weakened and depleted, while in Tamil Nadu, the other major regional force, the DMK, has been swept away by the new entrant, TVK, which is led by actor Vijay.