“How does the Bharatiya Janata Party win?” “How Modi won India!”These words – and their variations – held sway for a long time, reflecting both the popularity of Narendra Modi and the spectacular success of the election machine that his party ran. Today the same laudatory questions have acquired a satirical twist. Just how does the BJP win?Indeed, finally, questions are being asked about the BJP’s extraordinary victory run, especially in the recent state assembly elections, and more especially in the aftermath of the Special Intensive Revision of electoral rolls that the Election Commission carried out with breakneck speed and the absence of transparency.From the results, it is clear that only the deep South remains out of bounds for the party. It has run through most of the rest of India, establishing its stranglehold in state after state.In states where the BJP is already the incumbent (either by itself or as part of the National Democratic Alliance), it might be on a longevity pill: It just stays put, unaffected by the usual cycle of wins and losses. And in states where the incumbent is an opponent party, it lays siege to the latter’s citadel, wears it down and ambushes it like a predator. One stark fact to note is that the BJP doesn’t just win, it wins big.This trend has been particularly noticeable since the 2024 Lok Sabha election where the BJP was reduced to a minority. In revenge mode since then, the party has been on the up and up, pulling off landslide wins in a majority of state elections held between 2024 and 2026 – among them Haryana, Maharashtra, Delhi, Bihar and West Bengal. None of these states was considered a walkover for the BJP. Yet it scored a thumping majority in each of them. In Haryana and Bihar – the latter with the Janata Dal (United) and in effect the NDA – it faced a long anti-incumbency. In Haryana, the BJP bettered its previous tally and in Bihar it did so by an enormous distance. Against all logic, all predictions.Significantly, Bihar and Bengal went to the polls under an SIR regime that made no pretensions about where its sympathies lay. Cutting through petitions and protests, the Election Commission went ahead on its unconscionable mission of excising lakhs of voters, many with all the documents in their possession. The process, a fait accompli considering elections to these states are over, has since been endorsed by the Supreme Court. However, far from settling the issue, the SC’s clean chit, has provoked more questions and criticisms, Yogendra Yadav, political activist and a litigant in the case was unsparing, as were editorials in the Indian Express and The Hindu. Yadav said the apex court had authorised the disenfranchisement of at least 59 million voters with the figure likely to go up to 100 million. He said if till now, voters picked the government, from now on the government or BJP would pick the voters via a BJP-controlled Election Commission, thus delivering to itself a permanent majority.The Express argued that instead of holding the Election Commission to account, the Supreme Court had given it a free pass. “There are widespread concerns that the EC’s actions have tilted the balance against the citizen by shifting the burden of proof on to vulnerable voters…The court does not just exonerate the EC, it hands it a free pass by giving it the benefit of the doubt on every count and unfettered procedural latitude…” The Hindu said that in West Bengal the flaws of the SIR had led to arbitrary deletions and a systematic exclusion of the minorities and the underprivileged with statistical exercises indicating that this influenced poll outcomes in many constituencies.Also read: Data Shows SIR Helped BJP Win BengalJust days before the apex court judgement, an opinion piece in The Hindu had made exactly the same argument. Writing specifically about West Bengal in the May 22, 2026, edition of the paper Prasenjit Bose noted, “Constituency-wise analysis of the results reveals that out of the 207 seats won by the BJP in 2026, the magnitude of SIR deletions exceeded the winning margin of the BJP in 82 seats. Of these, 70 were located in the 12 Muslim concentrated districts. In 2021, BJP won only 9 out of these 82 ACs. In 2026, the SIR alterations appear to have decisively influenced the electoral outcome in these 82 ACs. In other words, it is not implausible that the BJP would have failed to secure a majority in the West Bengal assembly election without the impact of SIR.”If there were doubts about the BJP victories before the implementation of SIR, the SIR exercise has reinforced them.Union Home Minister Amit Shah during the ‘Janjati Sanskritik Samagam’. Photo: PTI/Arun Sharma For parachuting journalists, the BJP story has always been about its hard work, muscular organisation, precision planning and above all, a killer instinct to win. A famous line they were wont to repeat was: hard work done, victory clinched, Team Amit Shah with its army of foot soldiers has moved on to the next election-bound state. Stories were legion about BJP karyakartas (workers) walking miles to cover every inch of every district and mapping every polling booth so that nothing was left to chance. This was said with much awe and admiration and a contrast was also drawn with the opposition’s lack of energy and drive.But the pat theory of BJP’s sharp brain-hard work outsmarting a bone lazy Opposition has come undone. It is now increasingly apparent that the BJP has gamed the system. It has set itself up for forever victories through a winning formula of institutional capture, large scale deletion of opposition votes and intimidation through state power. This has meant that while the BJP is able to dodge anti-incumbency repeatedly, some of its rivals lose in just one term. Strikingly, performance has ceased to be an issue. The BJP can win despite an abysmal record in office while the non-BJP parties and can lose even with stellar performances. In short, failed governance doesn’t affect the BJP and good governance doesn’t help its opponents.The paradox of the BJP’s electoral successes coinciding with the country’s continuing economic decline was captured recently by economist Surjit Bhalla. Till now a staunch supporter of Prime Minister Narendra Modi and his polices, he told India Today’s Rajdeep Sardesai: “The investment climate in India is very bad, and that is what has gone wrong. On the other side, you’ve got the political climate. So I think what is happening is that the government is in a great comfort zone because it is winning all the elections. So it does not see any urgency or need to do reforms, especially on the growth side.”This begs the question: how is it that among all parties, BJP alone has been able to win against crippling hardship to the poor. Inflation, joblessness and corruption affecting the future of the youth, nothing seems to impair the party’s chances.Two examples stand out. One, the landslide victory of the BJP-JD(U) in Bihar in 2025, defying two decades of anti-incumbency. The JD(U)’s two brief alliances with the RJD aside, the BJP-JD(U) has been in office almost continuously. In the event, not only did the BJP-JD(U) win 202 of 243 seats in 2025 (81 more than in 2020), it did so overcoming a terrible record in office. Over two decades, Bihar has remained the poorest among Indian states.Also read: ‘Under This Government, the Poor, Farmers and Labourers are Dying, and No One Cares About Them’In contrast, the DMK government in Tamil Nadu, uniformly praised for its twin achievement of a stunning GDP growth alongside impressive social and human indicators, lasted just one term. Indeed, the governments in Bihar and Tamil Nadu present baffling opposites – the former for facing no hostility despite a disastrous record over two decades and the latter for being voted out in one term despite a sterling record of good governance. The entry of the swashbuckling C. Joseph Vijay, with a wild cine following, admittedly upset all calculations. But praise for the DMK government has not ceased. Instead, there is astonishment that M K Stalin, rated as India’s best chief minister, lost to a novice movie icon.A stunning ability to beat anti-incumbency but no gain to the people? During the 2025 Bihar election, Prannoy Roy raised this point in a conversation with Yogendra Yadav on his digital platform, DeKoder. I paraphrase a part of it below. :Prannoy Roy: Bihar has the lowest per capita monthly income, well below even the second lowest which is UP. Bihar’s per capita income per month is Rs 6,700 while Telangana’s is Rs 29,000…you don’t find this kind of discrepancy of 5 to 1 in any other country. Bihar so low but (with a high) pro-incumbency, 60% of the times they vote the government back. Really, when you go around, everybody says things are just in a terrible state, we don’t want to go outside and get a job, we miss our families, we want our jobs here, terrible, terrible state and then they vote the government back.Yogendra Yadav: You have travelled, I have travelled, poverty hits you in the eye, especially in North Bihar, you see so many children walking back from school barefoot. Poverty is everywhere for you to see. So my question is why does not democratic politics become a vehicle for [upliftment]?…What is most shocking is people’s low expectations…very low equilibrium of demand and supply of governance. And for that of course the political establishment of Bihar must be blamed.The Diplomat, a current affairs magazine for the Asia-Pacific regions, pointed to three factors that were challenging to the BJP alliance’s victory momentum in 2025. One, a stronger anti-incumbency than before, two, the queering of the pitch by the Prashant Kishor-led Jan Suraaj Party and three, the SIR of voter rolls which had ended with massive complaints around the deletion of genuine voters.In 2025, nothing went right for the BJP alliance in Bihar, except for the addition of Chirag Paswan. In the normal course of things, this should have been cancelled out by the entry of a third force in the form of the Jan Suraaj Party. But the JSP drew a blank. If in TN, the debutant Joseph Vijay’s TVK (Tamilaga Vetri Kazhagam) was the disrupter that ousted the DMK government, in Bihar, new contestant JSP, despite a wellspring of support from voters, flopped miserably. Could it be that the BJP is extraordinarily lucky? No matter what the party does, or doesn’t do, it comes up trumps.Jan Suraaj Party chief Prashant Kishor during an election roadshow at Bochahan Assembly constituency before the Bihar polls, in Muzaffarpur district, Friday, Oct. 31, 2025. Photo: PTI.One key question crops up here. If Bihar has remained a basket case for 20 years, what stopped the government from investing its all into the uplift of its people? Surely, voters who give long and repeated tenures to a government, are owed a minimal standard a living instead of subsistence existence. It is not even clear that there is no demand for betterment. To the contrary, voices from the ground indicate deep frustration with the status quo of low incomes and mass migration. In other words, the BJP’s legendary hard work would appear to be limited to winning elections. Once this is done, it’s onward to the next hunt rather than good governance where it has won.A comparison of BJP/NDA -ruled states with non-BJP states reveals further ironies.Even Gujarat, long a media darling and relentlessly pushed by the BJP as a model state, falls short when measured alongside a progressive Southern State like Tamil Nadu. Comparing the two states, experts unhesitatingly said that if there was a model state to follow for the rest of India, it was Tamil Nadu. Writing for TheWire in March 2025, Christophe Jaffrelot used World Bank criteria to note that Gujarat and TN were neck and neck in terms of growth rate but diverged significantly when measured for poverty. People living below the poverty line constituted 5.8% in TN as against 21.8% in Gujarat. Tamil Nadu was ahead of Gujarat in poverty alleviation, wages, educational attainment and health indices as well as in health care expenditure. Tamil Nadu’s midday meal scheme, which encouraged parents to send their children to school, covered 85.4% of secondary schools. The corresponding figure for Gujarat was 11%.Jaffrelot observed that, “Gujarat is clearly a success story in terms of growth but wealth that has been generated has been captured by a minority, mass poverty remaining prevalent, whereas Tamil Nadu’s society is less unequal and benefits from a similar growth rate.”Opposition-ruled Karnataka, Telangana and Tamil Nadu dominate the table of per capita income for larger states, coming in at numbers 5, 6 and 7 followed by Gujarat and Maharashtra. Madhya Pradesh, another BJP state with long incumbency, and Uttar Pradesh, where BJP has held two consecutive terms, come in at numbers 20 and 23, according to RBI data.This is evidence if evidence was required that BJP’s repeated victories are not because the party has delivered on the ground. The ‘hard work’ it puts in before and during an election campaign, for which it has been winning praise and admiration, seems to mysteriously subside once a state is won. So how indeed does it win?Vidya Subrahmaniam has been an editor at The Hindu and Times of India and has covered Indian politics as a reporter for over four decades.