A round of elections that signal structural dominance

The phase of Indian politics since 2014 has been widely termed as the fourth party system, with the BJP constituting a dominant pole, which increasingly structures the field of competition both at the national and state levels. Some observers have periodically posed the question whether this BJP dominant system represents a durable structural dominance or a more fleeting electoral dominance largely built on, and is sustained by, the charismatic leadership of Modi. 

These rounds of state elections should settle that question in favour of structural dominance. The setback received by the NDA in the 2024 elections suggested that Modi’s charismatic appeal had begun to recede from the dizzying heights scaled over the previous decade. Yet, the BJP has performed much better in the phase of elections between 2024-26 than it did either in 2014-16, when Modi still carried the transformative aura of the vikas purush, or in 2019-21, when he became the pro-poor messiah embodying an unmatched reservoir of popular trust. It is only in the present cycle that the BJP has managed to storm to power in Odisha, Delhi and West Bengal, the biggest prize of them all. 

Of course, Modi’s leadership remains important in terms of his ability to direct and manage the machinery of the system of power. But it is the sprawling machinery itself, involving the close nexus of party organization, wider Sangh networks, big industrial houses, and key state institutions, which drives the juggernaut of the BJP-dominant system.

In Haryana and Maharashtra, the mobilization of the RSS helped BJP blunt the spectre of anti-incumbency (especially among Dalits) that was stalking the ruling alliance after a decade in power. Similarly, in West Bengal, the Sangh Parivar laid the groundwork for the BJP campaign to mobilise scattered caste and community grievances (such as of Matuas and Rajbanshis) into a coherent, state-wide narrative of Hindu exclusion. 

In addition, the BJP has in the course of this period also built up an architecture of power that has made them the ‘natural party of governance’ (in the mould of the Congress period of dominance). The instruments of this power include the above-mentioned informal alliances and control over public institutions, through which the BJP is able to structure the party system to its advantage, breaking factions of opponent parties and co-opting its leaders. But it also involves manipulating the administrative machinery to deepen the ideological hold of Hindutva. 

The Himanta Biswa Sarma government has made the category of the “Bangladeshi Muslim immigrant” (read: Bengali speaking Muslim) the master signifier coursing through everyday functioning of bureaucratic institutions and the public regulation of land and resources. The category of the “Bangladeshi immigrant” has been embedded at the core of the policies and practices of the National Register of Citizens (NRC), the category of “D voter”, detention centres, delimitation, eviction drives, policing and surveillance. The interpellative capacity of the government procedures has turned the distinction between indigenous (Hindu) and outsider (Muslim) into the organizing idea for Assamese society in terms of imagining collective life and approaching the political world. The communalism of the Himanta government thus goes much beyond the regular hate speeches, it is indeed baked into the very architecture of governance and how people relate to it.

In Bengal, the BJP campaign was characterised by the underhanded tactics and partisan use of State institutions such as the ED, CBI and paramilitary forces, which were heavily deployed in an unprecedented manner in a state election (outside of Kashmir and the Northeast). Meanwhile, the shambolic and discriminatory rollout of the Special Intensive Revision by the Election Commission ensured that a substantial chunk of the TMC support base (primarily Muslims) was struck off from the electoral list. 

To withstand the juggernaut of the BJP-dominant system requires a politics of counter-hegemony. The Congress in Assam has failed to imagine such a politics over the last decade, let alone execute it. Instead, it turned to the scion of the Gogoi dynasty who was dispatched from Delhi and given the charge of the state a year before the election. The party relied on a dominant caste (Ahom) led consolidation in upper Assam and (Muslim) led consolidation in lower Assam. Meanwhile, the TMC banked on its narrative of Bengali pride, along with cash transfers to women and Muslim consolidation, to secure a fourth consecutive term. Both of these strategies failed spectacularly. 

The declining fortunes of both the established regional parties as well as the Congress can be traced back to the form of their organizations, which is the electoral-professional party. As theorized by the political scientist Angelo Panebianco, this is a party organized around the professional apparatus of campaign managers, consultants and pollsters (as opposed to ideologically motivated cadres), whose primary focus revolves around electoral competition. 

The rise of the electoral-professional party is an institutional adaptation to the prevailing developmental paradigm. For state governments to attract big capital and deliver on economic growth (and thereby amass the funds for social welfare), they are constrained to follow a similar bouquet of ‘good governance’ policies: pro-business reforms and big infrastructural projects. This led first to the shift of the prevailing party form from the (ideological/identity-based) mass party to the (centrist) catchall party. The rise of the technology-enabled direct cash transfers seeded the next transmutation from the catchall party to the electoral-professional party. The parallel professional framework becomes indispensable to connect these “techno-patrimonial” leaders (Yamini Aiyar) with their broad welfare constituency. 

As Neelanjan Sircar noted from his fieldwork in Bengal, the cadres of the TMC had been repurposed from the task of overseeing delivery of benefits (now outsourced to professionals) to mobilizing voters for elections. Even the DMK had been transformed by Stalin’s ‘CEO’ style leadership, from a decentralized organization of strong district secretaries into a centralized, disciplined and welfare-driven machine. A similar story could be told of Pinarayi Vijayan’ reshaping of the grassroots, cadre-based CPM into a top-down organization under his personalistic management. 

While MK Stalin, Pinarayi Vijayan, Mamata Banerjee achieved significant success after turning their parties from cadre-based to electoral-professional outfits, it masked the electoral fragility of such politics. The downside of a managerial, ideologically feeble politics is that it depoliticizes the electorate, and makes them turn to either the populist outsider solution (as in Vijay’s TVK in Tamil Nadu) or the Hindu nationalist solution (as in the BJP in West Bengal). While Kerala has gone for the conventional alternative in the Congress, it is not yet clear whether the deformed CPM in opposition would be able to protect its opposition space from the rising BJP, any better than it did in Tripura and West Bengal.