Renewing mandates & breaking barriers: BJP’s road to polls

New Delhi: As the Narendra Modi government showcases its achievements on the completion of 11 years in office, the ruling BJP has started to brace itself for a keen electoral contest in half a dozen states over the next 12 months. Three of these states — West Bengal, Tamil Nadu and Kerala — have eluded the BJP’s surge in Indian politics and remained largely out of the saffron outfit's grasp. In the remaining three — Bihar, Assam and Puducherry — the party will attempt to renew its mandate in alliance with its NDA allies.

Bihar will be the first to go to the polls, sometime after Diwali in 2025. With Nitish Kumar’s JD(U) by its side, the BJP is confident it has the social arithmetic on its side against Lalu Yadav’s RJD. Smaller parties like Chirag Paswan’s Lok Janshakti Party (Ram Vilas) and Jitan Ram Majhi’s HAM have been trying to drive a hard bargain to extract a favourable seat-sharing arrangement within the NDA. But the issues will be ironed out to everyone’s satisfaction, party leaders feel.

Bihar is the only heartland state where the BJP has never had a chief minister. It looks unlikely that the BJP would want to disrupt the current set-up before the elections, as Nitish has been the NDA’s CM face whenever the two parties have contested elections in alliance.

Once Bihar is done and dusted, Assam promises to be another interesting battle to watch out for, where CM Himanta Biswa Sarma will take on the Gaurav Gogoi-led Congress. Gogoi, son of former CM Tarun Gogoi, who also once mentored Sarma in the Congress, has recently been sent to Guwahati to head the state unit. Assam, the gateway to the Northeast, is crucial for both parties, as the outcome here tends to influence the other neighbouring states.

West Bengal is also likely to go to the polls with Assam in March next year. The BJP’s growth in the state, once a Left Front citadel, has been remarkable in the last 10 years, but not good enough to edge past Mamata Banerjee’s Trinamool Congress. The BJP is expected to announce its new state president soon, who will square off against the TMC in the upcoming polls.

Further south, in Tamil Nadu, the BJP has already made a course correction. It has forged an anti-DMK front led by the AIADMK after drawing a blank by going solo in the 2024 LS polls. But of late, actor Vijay has emerged as another variable in state politics. If he were to go alone, how would NDA arrest a division in anti-DMK votes? Or will the AIADMK try to forge a larger Opposition unity to challenge the DMK-led front for the 2026 elections? In Puducherry, which will vote along with TN, the BJP’s alliance with Chief Minister N Rangasamy’s party AINRC is likely to continue.

The situation in Kerala is a little trickier. It is the only state where the NDA is neither in power nor the main challenger. The BJP, on its own, managed to register its first LS victory in the state last year. Amid sparring among local leadership, the central leadership has appointed former Union minister Rajeev Chandrashekhar as its state chief.

In states where it has traditionally been weak, the BJP has sought to import strong leaders from other parties to fill the void — like Himanta Sarma in Assam and Suvendu Adhikari in West Bengal. Will it experiment with the same playbook in Kerala as well?