“The river Ganga flows to Bengal through Bihar — and just as its waters move eastward, our victory in Bihar has now opened the path to victory in Bengal,” declared Narendra Modi while celebrating the National Democratic Alliance’s sweeping win. But what, if anything, does the outcome in Bihar actually reveal about how the coming battle in Bengal might unfold?
Each state’s electoral dynamics are different. The Bihar verdict is unlikely to exert any direct or lasting influence on Bengal. Yet the question can be approached from another angle. The Bihar election offers revealing templates to both the ruling Trinamool Congress as well as for the Bharatiya Janata Party, the main Opposition party in Bengal. For Mamata Banerjee, it provides a template to ensure how a long-reigning provincial supremo with a middling governance record — and presiding over a personalistic, corruption-ridden party machinery — can retain power. Contrastingly, for the BJP in Bengal, the Bihar template is about how not to fight such an incumbent. The lesson is that it is hard to defeat an entrenched populist boosted by short-term welfare transfers by simply fighting on the electoral terrain of competitive populism. The challenge, instead, ought to be mounted on the political terrain of popular sovereignty.
There are two ways of analysing any election. One is to focus on the impact of short-term factors. These include ticket distribution, alliance-making strategy, performance of government schemes and so on. The other is to examine how the slow-moving tectonic plates of politics intersect in a way that produces political earthquakes separated by long periods of relative stasis. It is these political earthquakes that inaugurate a paradigm of politics, which then defines the pattern of political competition for the next few decades (think 1977 and 2011 for Bengal, or 1990 and 2005 for Bihar).
In this respect, this Bihar election was most certainly a paradigm-reinforcing election. There is nothing unprecedented about the scale of the NDA’s victory. In fact, the outcome closely mirrors the 2010 verdict. That year, the Janata Dal (United)-BJP alliance won 206 of 243 seats — four more than this time — while the Rashtriya Janata Dal was reduced to 22 seats, three fewer than now. The underlying gap between the NDA’s social coalition and that of the RJD remains equally wide. The combined vote-share of the BJP and the JD(U) then, as now, hovered around 40% (with the Lok Janshakti Party aligned with the RJD in 2010). The RJD had secured a little over 18% of the vote then, about five points lower than this time, a gap which can be largely accounted for by the present bipolarity.
Together, the parties largely stand where they stood 15 years ago. Despite the intervening twists and turns, the relative positions of Bihar’s political actors remain subject to an underlying political paradigm, which has stayed remarkably stable.
In contrast, the challenge for the BJP in Bengal is to bring about a political earthquake. By this we mean a paradigm-shifting election in the mould of 1977 and 2011. To extend Modi’s river metaphor, the BJP cannot rely on the slow, predictable flow of the Ganges but a political deluge — a flood capable of bursting through every institutional barrier that secures the rule of the TMC. That is an enormously difficult challenge.
By definition, the tantra (system/administrative machinery) of a lok-tantra is designed to be paradigm-reinforcing. It stabilises the ruling order by amplifying the organisational power of the incumbent, reproducing its social coalition and legitimising its narrative. This was as true under the old Congress raj in Bihar as it is under Nitish raj. The blatant misuse of para-State functionaries like the army of jeevika didis to mobilise the women’s vote in favour of Nitish, or the routing of eve-of-election cash transfers to key floating groups, such as the women and the poor, to reinforce Nitish’s welfarist brand has been extensively documented.
To overwhelm such an entrenched tantra, the Opposition must displace the incumbent’s specific mythic claim to represent the ‘lok’. As Carl Schmitt observed nearly a century ago, there is a fundamental paradox at the heart of ‘government by and for the people’: the people are not a single, unified, empirical entity but a mythic construct. No State is literally ruled by ‘the people’. Instead, democracies create a competitive arena in which parties and coalitions struggle to represent this imagined collective will. Each political formation advances its own claim to embody the sovereign people (lok) through a particular mythic symbol or narrative. Those that succeed in legitimising their claim through the popular vote then gain authority over the tantra.
Dominant parties do not fall simply because the Opposition assembles a wider political coalition or exposes their failures on a number of fronts. They collapse when an alternative formation exposes the widening gap between the regime’s claim to embody the lok and the actual functioning of the tantra. This rupture is typically produced through popular struggles that make visible the exclusions of specific groups from the political order. Once these exclusions become widely acknowledged, the ruling narrative loses its moral authority, creating the conditions for a genuine paradigm shift.
Recall how the Left Front’s 2006 landslide win masked deep grievances — unemployment, agrarian distress, party-bureaucratic ossification — that only became politically decisive in the next election. What kept the Left Front afloat was the absence of an Opposition which could convert this diffused discontent into a structured confrontation between the subaltern lok and the party-administrative tantra.
Mamata Banerjee became precisely that political catalyst between the 2006 and the 2011 elections. She was able to politically channelise a series of localised popular protests — Singur, Nandigram and Lalgarh — into a sweeping indictment of ‘cadre raj’. In doing so, she skilfully reclaimed the mythic figure of the peasant on whose struggles the Communist Party of India (Marxist) had first risen to power. Finally, in the 2011 election, the TMC harnessed the emotional and the political energy generated by the Singur-Nandigram struggles through the slogan, ‘Maa, Maati, Manush’, using it to articulate a new vision of popular sovereignty, one that ultimately supplanted the Left Front’s decades-old claim to represent the Bengali lok.
In contrast, the RJD campaign remained confined to competitive populist promises of jobs and cash transfers. There was no attempt by the party to transform episodic youth protests over Agniveer or paper leaks into a sustained movement against systemic exclusion. Between the elections, the party limited its engagement to symbolic gestures — press statements, sporadic marches, and reactive posturing. No attempt was made to construct such a lok-tantra frontier through sustained party intervention on the issues of prohibition excesses, recurrent flooding, and chronic infrastructure failures.
The BJP might have decisively lost the Bengal election in 2021 but its political challenge has remained precisely on this terrain of popular sovereignty. The sangh parivar machinery has continued to mobilise scattered caste and community grievances into a coherent, state-wide narrative of Hindu exclusion.
As Ayan Guha has shown, in contrast to the sporadic attempts of the TMC to mobilise subaltern communities, the BJP’s model of integration of these communities follows a more sustained and ideologically-directed model. For instance, demand for inclusion in citizenship by the Matua-Namasudra community is tied to reviving the collective memory of Partition as part of a resurgent Hindutva consciousness. Similarly, the movement for cultural-territorial autonomy among Rajbanshis is sought to be channelised through the issue of the National Register of Citizens and ‘illegal Bangladeshis’ while the demands for inclusion of certain intermediate castes in the OBC list are reframed in terms of opposition to the inclusion of Muslim castes in the OBC list as a result of ‘TMC appeasement’. Thus, vernacular Hindutva ties all concrete political demands — citizenship, reservation, cultural autonomy — into a broader, mythic claim of Bengali-Hindu sovereignty.
The TMC’s “franchise model”, as described by Dwaipayan Bhattacharyya, remains vulnerable to a paradigm-shifting election. In this system, local TMC units are run by political entrepreneurs who rely on Mamata Banerjee’s personal brand — not the party’s organisational credibility — to legitimise their patronage-based activities. This creates a widening gap between local leaders and ordinary people, producing growing disaffection with the party. Once this franchise model approaches a state of crisis, as Bhattacharyya expects to happen at some point, neither Mamata Banerjee’s personal appeal nor the administrative tantra would be able to prevent a paradigm-shifting election. Despite its recent setbacks, the BJP remains structurally well-placed to supplant the TMC’s Mamata-centric order with its own paradigm of Bengali-Hindu sovereignty.
Asim Ali is a political researcher and columnist