Regional Parties Keep BJP At Bay – OpEd
Indian democracy has always been a tug of war between Delhi’s ambitions and the states’ stubborn sense of self. Nowhere does this play out more vividly than in the Bharatiya Janata Party’s repeated failures to crack states where regional forces hold sway. Despite commanding national elections, despite its organisational muscle and charismatic leadership, the BJP keeps running into walls in Tamil Nadu, West Bengal, and Jharkhand. This is not bad luck or poor strategy. It reveals a hard truth about Indian politics: power here is earned locally, not handed down from the centre.
The BJP’s decade-long dominance nationally makes its regional struggles all the more striking. From the margins in the 1980s to sweeping victories in 2014 and 2019, the party rewrote India’s political map. Its formula—Hindu nationalism wrapped in development promises, amplified by relentless campaigning—conquered the Hindi heartland. But in states governed by entrenched regional players, this same formula falls flat. The reason cuts deep: regional parties do not just contest elections; they embody their voters’ sense of who they are.
Tamil Nadu is where the BJP’s national playbook becomes almost irrelevant. For over fifty years, Dravidian parties have owned this state, building their appeal on social justice, Tamil pride, and resistance to what they frame as northern imposition. The BJP’s vision of a unified Hindu identity clashes head-on with a political culture shaped by rationalist movements and linguistic assertiveness. In 2024, the party contested alone after alliances collapsed, pushing its vote share past eleven per cent for the first time. It won zero seats. The DMK alliance swept all thirty-nine constituencies, turning the election into a referendum on protecting Tamil identity from central overreach. Voters here are not rejecting development or good governance—they are rejecting the idea that their distinctiveness must be sacrificed for national unity.
West Bengal shows how a regional leader can turn cultural identity into armour. Mamata Banerjee did not just defeat the Left Front in 2011; she replaced it with a political style that treats every challenge as an attack on Bengali pride. When the BJP surged to eighteen parliamentary seats in 2019, it looked like a breakthrough. But Banerjee reframed the contest brilliantly, casting the BJP as outsiders bent on imposing Hindi and undermining Bengal’s cultural autonomy. Her government’s cash transfers to women, combined with grassroots organising that reaches into neighbourhoods the BJP cannot penetrate, proved decisive. By 2024, the Trinamool had reclaimed its dominance, winning twenty-nine parliamentary seats. The BJP remains the main opposition, but opposition is not power. Banerjee has mastered the art of making every election feel like a fight for Bengali survival.
Jharkhand adds another dimension: tribal identity and resource politics. The Jharkhand Mukti Morcha built its base on protecting indigenous communities from exploitation, a message that resonates in a state where land rights and cultural preservation matter more than abstract promises of development. In the 2024 assembly elections, the JMM-led alliance won comfortably, with the party itself taking thirty-four seats to the BJP’s twenty-one. The BJP campaigned hard on infiltration fears and governance failures, but voters cared more about schemes that put money directly into women’s hands and leaders who spoke their language about protecting tribal land. The BJP’s vote share was respectable, but translating votes into seats requires something the party has not managed here: deep roots.
What separates these states from places where the BJP thrives is not policy or performance but emotional connection. Regional parties speak to voters in idioms shaped by generations of shared experience. They do not parachute leaders in from Delhi; they promote local faces who understand unspoken cultural codes. They celebrate festivals that matter locally, defend linguistic rights that feel personal, and deliver welfare in ways that reinforce rather than erase identity. When the BJP arrives with its centralised messaging and uniform cultural vision, it feels like an imposition, not an invitation.
This matters because Indian federalism was designed precisely to resist uniformity. The Constitution deliberately scatters power, giving states control over education, culture, and local governance. Regional parties thrive within this structure because they were built for it. They do not need to worry about national security or foreign policy. They can pour all their energy into state-specific delivery, building networks that extend through welfare schemes, cultural organisations, and everyday social life into the fabric of communities.
These networks create loyalties that national parties struggle to penetrate. A voter whose family has supported the DMK for three generations, who benefits from its welfare schemes and sees its leaders at local temple festivals, is not easily persuaded by a visiting prime minister’s rally. Breaking such bonds requires more than resources or organisational strength. It requires becoming part of the community, not just campaigning in it.
The BJP has shown it can adapt when necessary. In Odisha, it ended Naveen Patnaik’s twenty-four-year rule in 2024 by building patiently over years. In Maharashtra, shrewd alliances with breakaway factions kept it in power. These successes share a pattern: the BJP either exploited splits within regional camps or built genuine local presence over time. Where it has tried to impose itself quickly against unified regional forces, it has repeatedly failed.
The path forward requires the BJP to choose between ideological purity and regional expansion. Its vision of cultural uniformity—one nation, one language, one identity—appeals to voters who want cohesion and strength. But it alienates those who treasure their distinctiveness and fear homogenisation. Adapting to regional realities means elevating local leaders, customising messages, and accepting that power in India must be negotiated state by state, community by community.
Regional parties face their own vulnerabilities: ageing leaders, succession battles, and corruption scandals that erode trust. But their core advantage remains. They are not visiting; they belong. They do not need to explain why they understand local concerns because their entire existence is built on those concerns.
This tension between national ambition and regional reality is not a bug in Indian democracy but a feature. It ensures that power remains dispersed, that local voices carry weight, and that no single party can impose its will everywhere. The BJP’s struggles in these states are not failures of strategy but encounters with the limits of centralised power in a diverse federation.
Where regional parties stand strong, the BJP will keep finding the going tough. Not because it lacks resources or talent, but because it is trying to win a game whose rules were written to favour those who already belong. National ambition in India must either learn to speak local languages—literally and metaphorically—or accept that some territories will remain beyond its reach. That constraint, frustrating as it may be for any dominant party, is precisely what keeps Indian democracy plural and alive.