Indians vote for change in key states of West Bengal, Tamil Nadu and Kerala

Assembly election results still being tallied in several states in India on May 4 reflect a strong mood for political change and signal monumental shifts in regional politics.

Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) has kicked the door open to power in West Bengal, an eastern state it has never governed. And a movie-star-turned-debutant politician is set to govern Tamil Nadu, a southern state that is one of India’s economic powerhouses.

Veteran political commentator Neerja Chowdhury attributed the results to strong anti-incumbency sentiment, particularly among young voters and women concerned about their future.

‘‘It’s an expression of the upwardly mobile and aspirational groups for change,’’ she told The Straits Times. ‘‘They put aside other considerations such as identity politics… What people were more worried and agitated about instead is jobs.’’

The ouster of two of India’s prominent opposition parties – the All India Trinamool Congress (TMC) in West Bengal and Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam (DMK) in Tamil Nadu – heralds an uncertain future for political opposition in the country.

‘‘It’s a real moment of crisis for the opposition now with the regional parties weakened,’’ noted Ms Chowdhury.

Even as the Election Commission of India was finalising the counts from the electronic voting machines at the end of Monday, an overall trend emerged clearly from the results in West Bengal, Tamil Nadu, Assam, Kerala and Puducherry, which went to the polls on different dates throughout April.

In West Bengal, at the time of writing this story, the BJP was set to register a spectacular victory with 206 seats in the 294-seat state assembly, ending the 15-year reign of the Mamata Banerjee-led TMC. This is much higher than its haul of 77 seats in the 2021 elections.

The south Indian state of Tamil Nadu threw up another unprecedented poll outcome: A newly minted party of movie superstar and debutant politician Joseph Vijay Chandrasekhar, popularly known as Thalapathy Vijay, swept the state.

His Tamilaga Vettri Kazhagam (TVK) party made a stunning debut and was set to win more than 105 of 234 assembly seats only two years after its launch. It displaced the DMK, a 76-year-old party, from power, scooping up votes from all traditional party bastions across the state.

Until May 4, West Bengal was one of the last few key opposition strongholds to hold out against the popular Mr Modi and his party. The state is now set to become one among the 22 states and union territories with the BJP in power either on its own or in alliance with other parties. India has 28 states and three union territories with legislative assemblies.

The TMC had mounted its campaign around the protection of Bengali identity and culture, describing the BJP as an ‘‘anti-Bengali’’ party that was out of touch with Bengal’s history, culture, and ethos. In response, the BJP shed this ‘‘outsider’’ tag by giving its local Bengali-speaking leaders more prominence during the campaign phase than it did in 2021.

BJP candidates in West Bengal – where the vast majority are non-vegetarian – even campaigned carrying fish and relished non-vegetarian food to dismiss allegations that their party was likely to ban the consumption of meat and fish in the state, something it has done on certain occasions in other parts of the country.

Addressing supporters at the BJP headquarters in New Delhi on the evening of May 4, Mr Modi quoted Bengali polymath and Nobel laureate Rabindranath Tagore to say that the BJP would create ‘‘a fear-free environment in Bengal’’.

‘‘The power of the people has triumphed, and the politics of good governance of the BJP has received the full blessings of the people here,’’ he added in a post on X.

The poll outcome in West Bengal follows a controversial voter list revision that saw the deletion of over 9 million voters. While the majority were those who had died or migrated, the process also disproportionately affected many marginalised people, especially Muslims, who are considered to be traditional TMC supporters.

Besides its pledges for development and welfare schemes, backed by the central government, the BJP’s clear mandate in West Bengal has been attributed to a strong consolidation of votes among Hindus, who make up around 70 per cent of the state’s population. Muslim votes, on the other hand, ended up being split among multiple non-BJP parties.

In Tamil Nadu, the popular but politically underestimated 51-year-old superstar, Mr Vijay, has given a jolt to Tamil Nadu’s two-party dominance, which ran for almost 60 years. As people broke into dance on the streets of Tamil Nadu and blew whistles as they would during a Vijay movie in a cinema hall, it was clear he had revived Tamil Nadu’s familiar liking for film icons in public office.

During the campaign, the actor’s fans turned into party cadres and used social media to tap into concerns about employment, nepotism and corruption, analysts said. Despite overall economic growth and falling unemployment rates, Tamil Nadu’s highly educated, skilled young men and women face frustrating joblessness, which seems to have propelled the desire for a new political force.

The TVK campaign’s resonance was most evident in the shocking defeat of incumbent chief minister MK Stalin by a TVK candidate who was in both Dravidian parties in the past.

‘‘Only 25-months old and anything but organised, Vijay’s party has defied all established norms. Voters didn’t give him an absolute majority but in a largely three-cornered contest, they overwhelmingly endorsed him,’’ Mr Kannan Rajarathinam, political observer and the biographer of several Tamil Nadu politicians, told ST.

‘‘The hard part now is to translate the voters’ imagination into reality. Like the two other alliances, Vijay too has made tall promises. He enjoys enormous goodwill and people’s confidence at the moment. How he delivers will make or break that goodwill,’’ he added.

In the other southern state of Kerala, the country’s last remaining communist government lost out to the Congress-led United Democratic Front (UDF), offering the Congress some solace amid its poor showing in other states such as West Bengal and Assam, where it was routed by the BJP. The UDF is set to win more than 100 of the 140 seats in the Kerala assembly.

Kerala tends to vote out incumbent governments every five years, but had reelected the Left Democratic Front (LDF) led by chief minister Pinarayi Vijayan after his globally lauded Covid-19 management saved many lives and reinvigorated a community spirit in the state’s residents.

But this time, the LDF suffered anti-incumbency that stemmed from allegations of corruption, political overreach, rising public debt and overconfidence that observers said was evident even in the campaign slogan, ‘‘If not LDF, then who?’’ The usually bickering Congress-led alliance instead ran a united campaign around jobs and development and against Mr Vijayan’s ‘‘arrogance’’, whom they mocked as ‘‘Modi in a dhoti’’.

Besides emerging victorious in West Bengal, the BJP also increased its seat share in Assam, winning over 80 out of the 126 seats in the state assembly to secure a third consecutive term in the northeastern state.

In Puducherry, a federally governed territory in South India, the All India N. R. Congress, which is part of the BJP-led National Democratic Alliance, also held on to power, and was set to win 11 of the 33 seats in the assembly. The BJP cornered another four.

In Tamil Nadu and Kerala, southern states that remain tough fortresses for PM Modi to breach, the BJP looked to win just a handful of seats and did not improve its tally. It was leading in two seats in Tamil Nadu and three in Kerala.

The recent polls are among a raft of state elections scheduled ahead of the 2029 general election. In 2027, several other states will go to the polls, including India’s most populous state of Uttar Pradesh, currently governed by the BJP.

The Indian National Developmental Inclusive Alliance (INDIA), a multi-party grouping of several political parties aligned against the BJP, which includes the Congress and the DMK, has had multiple setbacks in recent months. One was a defeat for the Rashtriya Janata Dal, one of its key constituents, in the November 2025 state elections in Bihar.

Seven members of Parliament from the Aam Aadmi Party, another key opposition party, also defected to the BJP in April 2026.

‘‘Will the INDIA bloc now hang together more closely and accept the leadership of the Congress – something they have resisted – because it’s an acute crisis for each one of them as they prepare for 2029?’’ added Ms Chowdhury. ‘‘Or will the Congress go it alone?’’

Source: The Strait Times 
--Agencies