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Let me begin with a provocative proposition I made after seeing the new Election Commission of India (ECI) – one that may sound excessively cynical to many, but is unfortunately not yet off the mark: for the next thousand years, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) will not lose an election unless it chooses to lose one. Not because its politics have become irresistible, nor because the opposition has collapsed beyond recovery, but because the machinery that produces electoral outcomes has itself become subsumed within its political project. Its choice will be determined solely by its own strategic calculus – whether the marginal gains from electoral victory are worth the corresponding loss of legitimacy in the eyes of both the Indian and international public. The five-state election results of May 4, 2026, only seem to confirm this proposition.

The larger point I wish to make is that any commentary, however analytically sophisticated, that ignores this foundational reality risks normalising the present situation as mere “business as usual.” In doing so, it dulls public sensitivity to the catastrophic implications this trajectory may hold for India’s future.

The States BJP was indifferent to

The two southern states, Kerala and Tamil Nadu, along with the Union Territory of Puducherry, were not on the BJP’s operational radar. It could not afford to deploy its more dubious electoral strategies there without risking a severe backlash and a long-term erosion of legitimacy. In Kerala, the BJP has never managed to break through the entrenched Left Democratic Front (LDF)-United Democratic Front (UDF) bipolarity that has structured politics in the state with remarkable regularity for decades. Indeed, that cycle itself had been disrupted when the people returned the LDF to power for a consecutive term – an exception in Kerala’s political history. It was therefore widely expected that the pendulum would swing back this time.

Tamil Nadu presents a different but equally significant case. Dravidian political culture has historically remained resistant to the idioms of Hindi-belt majoritarian politics, and the BJP lacks any meaningful organisational depth in the state. Puducherry, meanwhile, is a Union Territory ultimately under the Centre’s control, where the National Democratic Alliance (NDA) already held power and faced no serious challenge to retaining it.

The results in these regions therefore reflect precisely this absence of intervention. In Kerala, the UDF predictably returned to power. In Tamil Nadu, the victory of Vijay’s Tamilaga Vettri Kazhagam (TVK) may not have been widely anticipated, but it cannot be dismissed as accidental. While politically opposed to both major Dravidian parties, Vijay nevertheless remained rooted in a distinctly Tamil civilisational idiom. His appeal was strengthened by a deeply networked fan-club structure extending across the state down to the taluka level, consciously cultivated for electoral mobilisation years before the formal launch of TVK. The party’s success therefore appears to reflect a genuine popular desire to move beyond the familiar Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam (DMK)-All India Anna Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam (AIADMK) binary. The BJP, evidently, remained largely indifferent to the outcome in Tamil Nadu.

These results deserve careful attention, not because they are dramatic, but because of what they reveal about the nature of electoral democracy itself. Tamil Nadu, in particular, is a striking example. An entirely new political formation, led by a film star with no prior organisational history, managed to rupture one of India’s most entrenched regional two-party systems. This is precisely the kind of outcome a relatively free electoral process can produce: unpredictable, surprising, and expressive of genuine public sentiment rather than managed preference.

The Tamil Nadu verdict is therefore not an embarrassment to the argument advanced here; it is perhaps its strongest confirmation. When the ECI is not deployed as an instrument of the ruling party’s political ambitions, electorates can and do produce unexpected outcomes. They can express fatigue, reject established formations, and throw up new political actors. They can vote against the grain. They can exercise something resembling democratic sovereignty.

Assam represented a different situation altogether. The BJP was confident of retaining power there, and it did so without requiring any extraordinary intervention. The Congress, still the principal opposition in the state, has been organisationally hollowed out over the past decade – through defections, sustained agency pressure on its........

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