What the poll results say about Indian politics 

1. This is not the end, but the transformation of caste politics. The dominant communities that mobilised other backward classes (OBCs) and Dalits under the flag of social justice have fallen victim to their own success. The BJP’s decades-long strategy of harnessing the resentment among numerically smaller caste groups against dominant castes such as Yadavs, Jatavs, Jats, Marathas will continue to reward it for a long time. The kind of social justice politics championed by the Samajwadi Party, the Bahujan Samaj Party and the Rashtriya Janata Dal has come to naught. The idea that Hindutva can be challenged by Mandal is no longer valid, if it ever was. Members of all castes seek honour and empowerment by being part of and participant to the larger Hindu ritual and political universe, and not by challenging it. Characterising the BJP as an upper caste party has few takers among voters

2. Gender politics is playing to the BJP’s advantage. Congress leader Priyanka Gandhi’s attempts to overcome caste and religion-based politics by mobilising women, and youth as horizontal categories collapsed, while anecdotal evidence suggest that both women and youth voted for the BJP in large numbers. Prime Minister Narendra Modi inspires more confidence among a broad spectrum of voters, and it will remain so in the foreseeable future. In other words, attempts by the Opposition to sidestep religious, regional or caste categories by mobilising them as women or youths, is a non-starter. They have already been mobilised behind Mr. Modi in significant measure. 

3. Mobilisation on class lines has never been easy, in India or anywhere else in the world. The farmers’ agitation that led the BJP to withdraw the three farm reform laws it had enacted created an impression that there could be class politics. But the results showed that it was a chimera. Caste is gone; class could not take its place — as a driver of political choices.

4. This marks the end of identity politics for Muslims in the heartland. In the West Bengal and Kerala elections last year, the Muslims played a determining role. In this round, their electoral significance was only as a fear factor. The community will have to look for political options, and the BJP could very well be among the options they will consider. A new terms-of-engagement between the Muslims and the BJP could begin to take shape. 

5. The takeover of the Punjab government will likely add a new Centre-State frontier. The Shiv Sena-led government in Maharashtra has been using its State powers to counter the use of executive power the Centre uses against the Opposition. The Prime Minister warned in his victory speech on Thursday that people who are scared of his anti-corruption drive, are ganging up against him. He was possibly alluding to the moves against the Enforcement Directorate by some State governments, and an ongoing case in the Supreme Court against the Prevention of Money Laundering Act (PMLA) that the ED uses — in many cases, against political opponents of the BJP.

6. It is, however, unclear how Aam Aadmi Party chief Arvind Kejriwal will relate to the Centre, Mr. Modi and the BJP in the coming days. After his initial confrontations with Mr. Modi, Mr. Kejriwal had made peace with him for two reasons — first, he does not want to be caught on the wrong side of Hindutva/nationalist questions. Second, he has come to accept the popularity of Mr. Modi and does not want to wrestle with him — in fact, he toned down his attacks on the PM as a political strategy. One has to wait and watch how the new frontier of the Kejriwal-Modi face-off takes shape. 

7. The presumed caste determinism of electoral mobilisation had made SP leader Akhilesh Yadav so complacent that he thought he did not require to do anything at all to return to power. His cynical approach to people’s choices has now been exposed, after biting the dust in four elections, and trying out various mixes of caste-communal combinations. In the 2014 and 2019 Lok Sabha elections and 2017 and 2022 Assembly elections, he led the Samajawadi Party to defeats. There seems little he can do as a challenger to the BJP.