Assembly Elections Exit Poll 2026 Date and Time: How to check details for Bengal, Tamil Nadu, Assam and Kerala?
The BJP's energetic rise is also directly the cause of the Opposition's waning, but that may not tell the full story. THE results of the Assembly elections in West Bengal and Tamil Nadu, Assam and Kerala, were undoubtedly shaped by factors that were state-specific. But if there is a binding theme, it is this: The BJP’s growth and spread beyond its traditional bastions into new arenas and areas coincides with the declining fortunes of its political opponents. The BJP’s energetic rise is also directly the cause of the Opposition’s waning, but that may not tell the full story. Be it the rout of Mamata Banerjee in West Bengal and MK Stalin in Tamil Nadu now, or Nitish Kumar bowing out with Lalu Prasad’s RJD failing to hold up its end in Bihar, or the eclipse of Naveen Patnaik in Odisha, or BJP’s longtime ally-turned-rival Uddhav Thackeray presiding over the Sena’s splintering in Maharashtra, or the signs of implosion in Arvind Kejriwal’s AAP, or be it Congress’s seemingly unchecked slide despite its Kerala victory — the downward trajectory of the party on the other side of the BJP is not just because of the BJP, its undimmed aggression and its vast resources. It is also due to the inertia and do-nothingness of the Opposition party, its sameness and staleness in a time when a young and aspirational electorate is on the move, both literally and as part of shifting imagined communities. Quite simply, the BJP’s success lies, fundamentally, in constantly finding new ways of speaking to this people, by adding to its layered appeal. And the Opposition’s failure comes from its increasing political solipsism, its turning away from the challenges of change, its glib recourse to apocalypse-mongering.Essentially, the verdicts in West Bengal and Tamil Nadu and Kerala frame the people’s push for change. The BJP seized the impulse and built on it in West Bengal, while a new player came in to reap the disillusion with the five-decade-old alternation of parties in Tamil Nadu. Congress benefited from the desire for change in Kerala, while in Assam, the only exception to this story, it failed to even become a receptacle for it. THE outcome in West Bengal, which has been, by far, the most dramatic in this round of elections, with Tamil Nadu coming in second, was made possible, above all, because Mamata Banerjee ignored the warnings. Her party, the TMC, which she led into power by uprooting a 34-year-old Left regime, did not heed the sound of the BJP’s footfall, first with only three seats in 2016, which later shot up to 77 in the 2021 assembly. It refused to brace for the competition by reflecting on its own shortcomings — be it the failure of its government to pull Bengal out of its economic slump, or its inability to check the corruption and unaccountability growing within the party. Inheriting the “party-society” model from Left rule, the TMC nurtured a network of political entrepreneurs that smudged the lines between party, institution and government like the Left’s Syndicate, but unlike it, without any constraints of ideology. The TMC’s standstill laid the ground for the BJP, whose unrelenting determination to capture the state of Syama Prasad Mookerjee, to stitch the east to its conquests in the country’s north and west, has finally met with success. It rides on a Hindu consolidation around the spectre of the “ghuspaithiya”, projection of Banerjee’s politics as “minority appeasement”, and a combination of its criticism of Banerjee’s governance with an identity politics that was subterranean during Left rule and had risen to the surface under the rule of Didi, who had opened the floodgates. How the SIR, which in West Bengal, more than in any other state, became an exclusionary exercise, contributed to the outcome, will be known in days to come. The 27 lakh excluded in the controversial second round of deletions, whose appeals are still pending (less than 2000 were reinstated by the tribunals), are a challenge for the new government to address u