In Indian politics, not all elections test the same muscle. Some examine a party’s ability to mobilise voters; others test whether it can reshape political cultures that have long resisted it . For the BJP, the 2026 Assembly contests in West Bengal and Tamil Nadu appear to belong to the latter category.
Home Minister Amit Shah’s visits to Kolkata and Chennai at the turn of the year were an early indication of how seriously the party is taking both contests. These were not conventional campaign tours but exercises in organisational stock-taking and political calibration.
For a party that has already consolidated its dominance in the Hindi heartland and reinforced its national footprint through the 2024 Lok Sabha elections and a series of state victories in 2025, Bengal and Tamil Nadu now stand out as the remaining big tests of territorial expansion.
West Bengal is no longer unfamiliar terrain for the BJP. The days when the party struggled to field candidates or polling agents are long past. Shah’s tightly packed meetings in Kolkata that brought together state leaders, elected representatives and RSS organisers reflected a party that believes it has moved beyond protest politics and into serious contention.
The BJP’s internal argument rests on a clear upward trajectory from three MLAs in 2016, 77 in 2021, and a near 40% vote share in the 2024 Lok Sabha elections. Shah’s emphasis on booth committees covering most polling stations was meant to signal organisational readiness for a larger political role.
His press conference trained its focus on familiar fault lines like corruption allegations, infiltration from Bangladesh, and, most sharply, women’s safety. References to the RG Kar Medical College rape-murder case, Sandeshkhali and other incidents were aimed at tapping into a growing unease that has begun to cut across party loyalties in parts of the state.
If the BJP’s challenge in Bengal in 2021 was one of credibility, the challenge in 2026 is one of believability—whether organisational gains and electoral arithmetic can overcome the Trinamool Congress’s deep-rooted social and cultural connect.
Tamil Nadu presents a different challenge altogether. Here, the BJP is not building on a near-miss but attempting a structural shift in a political culture that has historically resisted national parties.
Shah’s meetings in Chennai were notably less about rhetoric and more about arithmetic. The emphasis on sustained ground engagement, early candidate identification and aggressive social media outreach points to a long campaign rather than a last-minute push.
The political attack on the DMK followed a familiar template—allegations of corruption, unfulfilled promises and administrative failure, including references to the TASMAC liquor scam and caste tensions in the southern districts. But the sharper focus was on alliances. Engagements with AIADMK leaders, the formal entry of a PMK faction into the NDA, and exploratory discussions involving figures such as T T V Dhinakaran reflect an effort to stitch together a broad anti-DMK coalition.
In Tamil Nadu, however, alliances are not merely electoral arrangements; they function as social contracts. Community arithmetic—Vanniyars, Thevars and other influential groups—will matter as much as ideology. Shah’s reported openness to engaging emerging forces such as Vijay’s Tamilaga Vettri Kazhagam underlines a pragmatic approach, even as it carries the risk of overcomplication.
Two states, one larger question
Seen together, West Bengal and Tamil Nadu mark the outer limits of the BJP’s current expansion. One is a state where the party has disrupted the political order but not yet replaced it; the other is a state where disruption itself remains a work in progress.
Success in either would strengthen the BJP’s claim of being a genuinely pan-Indian party, capable of adapting to strong regional identities without diluting its national narrative. Failure, or even stagnation, would suggest that organisational strength and electoral momentum have limits in the face of entrenched political cultures.
Amit Shah’s early interventions make one point clear: the BJP does not intend to leave these contests to chance. By 2026, Bengal and Tamil Nadu will have done more than choose governments—they will have helped define how far the BJP’s next phase of expansion can realistically go.
Disclaimer
Views expressed above are the author’s own.
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