BJP+SIR Wrest Bengal, Vijay Upends Tamil Politics, DMK-TMC-Left Losses a Blow to National Opposition; US-Israeli Campaign Has Failed in Iran
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May 4, 2026
Siddharth Varadarajan
The results from the assembly elections to West Bengal, Assam, Tamil Nadu, Kerala and Puducherry are in. The BJP has consolidated its stranglehold over east India – wresting West Bengal and retaining Assam – but still finds South India beyond its reach. The Election Commission has a helpful overview of the results and here are eleven key takeaways.
West Bengal going saffron is arguably the most consequential state assembly election victory the Bharatiya Janata Party has registered since Narendra Modi became prime minister in 2014. The BJP won 206 of the state’s 294 seats, with the Trinamool Congress of Mamata Banerjee confined to just 81 seats – but questions are already being asked about the extent to which the Election Commission’s deletion of voters from the electoral rolls helped the BJP cross the finishing line. The EC removed some 9 million names from the rolls in a less than transparent and fair process known as the Special Intensive Revision. This included 2.7 million (27 lakh) voters who were disqualified simply because the commission used software to flag ‘logical discrepancies’ in their identity documents and then ran out of time to scrutinise and adjudicate their claims.
If one considers that the final gap between the BJP and TMC was just 32 lakh votes, the scale and manner of these deletions may well have helped the BJP defeat Mamata. We will know more about this when constituency level victory margins are compiled and compared with the number of deleted voters. Stay tuned.
The BJP’s Suvendu Adhikari – himself a former TMC leader – defeated Mamata Banerjee in the Bhabanipur constituency and is now a front-runner for the post of chief minister. Given the strategic importance of West Bengal for the BJP’s political and ideological project, however, this is one state that Narendra Modi and Amit Shah are likely to take full charge of so who becomes CM is likely to be of secondary importance.
While the Bengal result is a big boost for the BJP, the victory of actor Vijay and his newly launched Tamizhaga Vetri Kazhagam (TVK) in Tamil Nadu is no less tectonic. The ruling DMK-led alliance was confident going in to the polls but erred in treating its principal rival as the AIADMK, which had teamed up with the BJP. Canny reporters correctly read the wave that had built up for Vijay’s TVK and today’s results saw him win 108 out of 234 seats. Vijay is short of a majority by 10 seats but will find it quite easy to win the support of smaller parties allied to one or the other Dravidian bloc. The Congress, VCK. and Communists have 11 seats between them and would not be averse to backing a TVK government, one would imagine. The AIADMK may also have an incentive to offer support but given Vijay’s statement that the BJP is his ‘ideological enemy’ he may be wary of getting indirectly linked.
In Assam, Chief Minister Himanta Biswa Sarma’s openly communal campaigning, the gerrymandering of constituency boundaries in the recent delimitation exercise and his ability to poach senior leaders from the opposition helped the BJP increase its hold over the assembly. While the Congress was routed there, the party was able to defeat the Left Front in Kerala and come back to power after a gap of 10 years.
Net-net though, today’s results will have repercussions beyond the individual states. The defeat of the DMK has robbed the INDIA opposition alliance of a strong ideo-political anchor, especially when it comes to the fight to defend federalism, secularism and the constitution. The Trinamool Congress too has been an important constituent of the opposition but is bound to feel weakened now that it no longer controls West Bengal. Similarly, the Left’s loss of Kerala means the Communists are without a state government for the first time since 1977. If we add to this mix the fact that the BJP was able to
