The spontaneous protests against Citizenship (Amendment) Act and National Register of Citizens by students from institutions as diverse as Jamia Millia Islamia, Jawaharlal Nehru University, Aligarh Muslim University, Indian Institutes of Management, Indian Institutes of Technology and the Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore tell us that something unusual is happening in our polity. It’s no longer what was earlier seen as a predictable trajectory of politics under Narendra Modi, who seeking to deepen the Bharatiya Janata Party’s Hindutva consolidation programme based on the most aggressive targeting of the minorities since India’s independence.It is quite significant that the students’ protest is also accompanied by a strong reassertion of regional and sub-national identity politics, which has always existed below the surface. The present troubles for Modi and Amit Shah began with their total misreading of the ethnic sentiment in Assam and the Northeast in the context of the CAA.In their sheer hubris flowing from the 2019 electoral mandate, both Modi and Shah had thought they had successfully erased the ethnic fault lines in Assam by creating a division along Hindu-Muslim lines. The CAA was clearly aimed at rescuing the Hindus found with inadequate documentation among the 19 lakh Assamese outside the NRC. But Shah got a rude surprise from Assam and the Northeast, which erupted into the biggest agitation in recent decades. The region outrightly rejected BJP’s attempt to overlay ethnic politics with its majoritarian agenda.Modi got a similar shock, since he spent considerable time in his public meetings during the Jharkhand election campaign assuring the people of Assam that he won’t allow anything that would undermine their “traditions, language and cultural identity”. The NRC and CAA were big parts of his campaign. In one sense, this message was also meant for the tribal communities of Jharkhand, where a similar underlying tension was playing out. Tribal leaders were bent upon unseating the BJP chief minister, Raghubar Das, widely seen as an outsider imposed on the people by Amit Shah and Modi.Also read: An Indian Kristallnacht in the MakingOne could possibly argue that Das’s humiliating defeat in his own assembly seat is partly a reassertion of their tribal identity by Jharkhand voters. BJP won just two of the 28 tribal-dominated seats in Jharkhand. To some extent, Shiv Sena recalibrating itself somewhat away from the naked majoritarianism of the BJP under Modi-Shah and seeking to more firmly secure for itself a regional “Marathi Manus” flavour may be seen as part of a broader trend of regional politics reasserting itself against the framework of “one nation, one culture, one language, one leader” that Shah thinks he can gift Modi over time.Uddhav Thackrey’s use of the Jallianwala Bagh parable for the police assault on Jamia students was striking in this regard. Thackrey clarified he had chosen his words carefully. If anything, the exaggeration was deliberate and was aimed at signalling Shiv Sena’s warning against unwarranted assault on people in the name of narrow majoritarian nationalism.In my assessment, the 2019 victory gave both Modi and his RSS handlers an exaggerated sense that the BJP’s 2019 victory was largely a Hindutva mandate calling for rapid and aggressive implementation of its majoritarian agenda. Shah is right when he says the BJP was merely implementing promises like criminalising triple talaq, abrogating Article 370, CAA-NRC and Ram Mandir. But neither the prime minister nor the home minister would have expected such a ferocious pushback against the CAA and NRC. So much that the prime minister is flatly denying there was any plan for a nationwide NRC, when his home minister had made statements to the effect in parliament.I feel the government will hold off on a Uniform Civil Code after the spontaneous outburst of protest against the CAA in India and abroad. If anything, Modi must be seriously worried about his rapidly deteriorating global image as a Hindu bigot bent on humiliating the 20 crore Muslims of India. The manner in which Modi denied that there was ever any plan to implement a India-wide NRC or to build detention camps was probably aimed more for the foreign audience. Locally, of course, people know he is not speaking the truth.However, the full import of implementing all the majoritarian promises in the BJP manifesto is just dawning on everyone, including perhaps the BJP itself. The nationwide protests against the CAA and NRC seem to have given new energy to regional parties, which will assert themselves more and more in the years ahead. The Congress, though still numbed by the rapid developments since 2019, is trying its best to align with regional outfits as it did in Maharashtra and Jharkhand.To be sure, Modi and Shah will not give up on their politics so easily and will continue to seek consolidation of majoritarian nationalism, at least in the Hindi heartland states where there is no particular self-imagined sub-national or ethnic culture as one finds in the East, Northeast and South. What is clear is the BJP is struggling to bring India’s diverse cultures under one umbrella of “Hindi, Hindu, Hindustan”. This project has been attempted in a haphazard manner, sometimes by merely testing the waters like the NDA did by trying to impose Hindi in the Southern states only to be received with hostility.Also read: Regional Issues Triumph Communal Fervour as BJP Learns Yet Another Lesson in JharkhandThe Bengal assembly elections will be a big test for the BJP. One will have to see whether it manages to replicate its Lok Sabha vote share and convert them into seats. Going by the trends in Haryana, Maharashtra and Jharkhand so far, and going by pre-poll surveys for the Delhi elections, it may appear that the BJP is losing the plot at the state level.The nationwide protests against the CAA and the widely perceived assault on the basic tenets of the Indian constitution seem to have provided a new moment of truth for Indian politics. At one level we must thank Modi and Shah, whose relentless dogwhistle campaign against the minorities has suddenly woken the educated youth of India to the real dangers of India’s constitution itself getting upended.Against this backdrop, the growing assertion of regional and sub-national identities provides a potent mixture for a new politics. Modi and Shah cannot underestimate this, even with all the resources and the core Hindutva vote at their command. The near collapsing economy and the growing frustrations of the unemployed youth must certainly add fuel to the centrifugal forces of politics.