BJP’s historic state dominance, Takaichi’s ‘proactive’ Indo-Pacific role, AI’s emerging role in diplomacy, Pyongyang’s ‘normal nation’ push, Myanmar’s change without change, Taiwan’s national happiness win.

Narendra Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) dominated India’s recent state and territory elections, winning in West Bengal and holding Assam and, with coalition partners, the federal territory of Puducherry.

BJP won West Bengal for the first time in the party’s 46-year history. It, and its alliance partners, now control 21 of 28 states, governing some 72 per cent of India’s 1.4 billion people.

Al Jazeera said the West Bengal victory was arguably the Hindu nationalist party’s most consequential victory since Modi came to power in 2014.

“The lotus has bloomed in West Bengal,” Modi said on social media, referring to BJP’s election symbol.

Five state and territory elections were held last month but the results were not declared until this week. The other two states contested were Kerala and Tamil Nadu. In Kerala, a communist government lost to an alliance led by Congress. Tamil Nadu was won by a new party led by actor-politician Chandrasekaran Joseph Vijay, known simply as Vijay.

But West Bengal was the grand prize. The state was home to almost 100 million people, 27 per cent of whom were Muslim, Al Jazeera said.

BJP campaigned on anti-incumbency themes against the seemingly entrenched, but now outgoing, chief minister Mamata Banerjee, and made use of its well-practised anti-Muslim rhetoric. It won 207 out of 294 seats.

The Electoral Commission of India recently revised the voting rolls, eliminating 2.7 million voters in West Bengal. Muslims were disproportionately affected, according to Al Jazeera.

An OpEd in The Statesman newspaper said no party had so dominated state and territory ground since the late 1970s, in Indira Gandhi’s time as Congress leader.

The footprint of the National Democratic Alliance, the coalition BJP leads, covered some 72 per cent of India’s land area, the article said. The Ganga (Ganges) ran entirely through NDA-governed states. “That is not a coincidence of geography,” it said. “It is the result of sustained political work across a decade.”

The results, said an analysis in The Indian Express, highlighted the national electoral prowess of the BJP and the ideological supremacy of Hindutva, a right-wing ideology that aims to make India a Hindu nation-state.

The article, by contributing editor P B Mehta, said BJP’s victories were a tribute to furious energy and political imagination but they also carried a shadow for Indian democracy.

“For now, Hindutva is producing a culturally hierarchical order where the claims of identity imperil India as a zone of freedom,” Mehta said. “For now, India is in the grip of Hindutva supremacy; it has been sold as a utopian dream. There is no rival.”

Takaichi adds to Abe’s blueprint

Japanese Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi visited Vietnam and Australia in the past week, stressing her commitment to the idea of a free and open Indo-Pacific, as spelled out by her predecessor and mentor, the late Shinzo Abe.

Two weeks before, in an online meeting with regional leaders, she pledged US$10 billion (A$13.78 billion) to help Southeast Asian nations cope with the effects of the US war on Iran on oil prices and supply. She later scrapped........

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