Let me begin with a provocative proposition I made after seeing the new Election Commission of India (ECI) – one that may sound excessively cynical to many, but is unfortunately not yet off the mark: for the next thousand years, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) will not lose an election unless it chooses to lose one. Not because its politics have become irresistible, nor because the opposition has collapsed beyond recovery, but because the machinery that produces electoral outcomes has itself become subsumed within its political project. Its choice will be determined solely by its own strategic calculus – whether the marginal gains from electoral victory are worth the corresponding loss of legitimacy in the eyes of both the Indian and international public. The five-state election results of May 4, 2026, only seem to confirm this proposition.The larger point I wish to make is that any commentary, however analytically sophisticated, that ignores this foundational reality risks normalising the present situation as mere “business as usual.” In doing so, it dulls public sensitivity to the catastrophic implications this trajectory may hold for India’s future.The States BJP was indifferent toThe two southern states, Kerala and Tamil Nadu, along with the Union Territory of Puducherry, were not on the BJP’s operational radar. It could not afford to deploy its more dubious electoral strategies there without risking a severe backlash and a long-term erosion of legitimacy. In Kerala, the BJP has never managed to break through the entrenched Left Democratic Front (LDF)-United Democratic Front (UDF) bipolarity that has structured politics in the state with remarkable regularity for decades. Indeed, that cycle itself had been disrupted when the people returned the LDF to power for a consecutive term – an exception in Kerala’s political history. It was therefore widely expected that the pendulum would swing back this time.Tamil Nadu presents a different but equally significant case. Dravidian political culture has historically remained resistant to the idioms of Hindi-belt majoritarian politics, and the BJP lacks any meaningful organisational depth in the state. Puducherry, meanwhile, is a Union Territory ultimately under the Centre’s control, where the National Democratic Alliance (NDA) already held power and faced no serious challenge to retaining it.The results in these regions therefore reflect precisely this absence of intervention. In Kerala, the UDF predictably returned to power. In Tamil Nadu, the victory of Vijay’s Tamilaga Vettri Kazhagam (TVK) may not have been widely anticipated, but it cannot be dismissed as accidental. While politically opposed to both major Dravidian parties, Vijay nevertheless remained rooted in a distinctly Tamil civilisational idiom. His appeal was strengthened by a deeply networked fan-club structure extending across the state down to the taluka level, consciously cultivated for electoral mobilisation years before the formal launch of TVK. The party’s success therefore appears to reflect a genuine popular desire to move beyond the familiar Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam (DMK)-All India Anna Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam (AIADMK) binary. The BJP, evidently, remained largely indifferent to the outcome in Tamil Nadu.These results deserve careful attention, not because they are dramatic, but because of what they reveal about the nature of electoral democracy itself. Tamil Nadu, in particular, is a striking example. An entirely new political formation, led by a film star with no prior organisational history, managed to rupture one of India’s most entrenched regional two-party systems. This is precisely the kind of outcome a relatively free electoral process can produce: unpredictable, surprising, and expressive of genuine public sentiment rather than managed preference.The Tamil Nadu verdict is therefore not an embarrassment to the argument advanced here; it is perhaps its strongest confirmation. When the ECI is not deployed as an instrument of the ruling party’s political ambitions, electorates can and do produce unexpected outcomes. They can express fatigue, reject established formations, and throw up new political actors. They can vote against the grain. They can exercise something resembling democratic sovereignty.Assam represented a different situation altogether. The BJP was confident of retaining power there, and it did so without requiring any extraordinary intervention. The Congress, still the principal opposition in the state, has been organisationally hollowed out over the past decade – through defections, sustained agency pressure on its leadership, and the gradual exhaustion of a party unable to articulate a compelling state-level political identity after losing power. Assam was, in effect, a victory the BJP did not need to engineer. The opposition had already collapsed under its own accumulated weaknesses.Bengal posed the only real challengeThe BJP’s relationship with West Bengal has long been marked by sustained and intensifying obsession. In 2016, the party held just three seats in a 294-member assembly. Three. It was electorally insignificant in a state that had served for over three decades as the fortress of the Left and, since 2011, as the domain of Mamata Banerjee.In 2019, riding the Modi wave in the Lok Sabha elections and capitalising on growing anti-TMC sentiment, the BJP won 18 of the state’s 42 parliamentary seats – a dramatic breakthrough that created the impression that Bengal might finally be within its grasp.The 2021 assembly election marked the BJP’s first full-scale attempt to capture the state. It was no symbolic contest. Narendra Modi campaigned relentlessly across Bengal. Amit Shah turned the election into a personal political mission. Several Union ministers resigned from their portfolios to contest the assembly election – an extraordinary sacrifice of national office for a state campaign, revealing the immense symbolic and strategic stakes the BJP had attached to Bengal. The party viewed the establishment of a BJP government in a state that had historically never embraced right-wing politics in significant numbers as a form of ideological homage to Shyama Prasad Mukherjee, who hailed from Bengal. The scale of resources deployed was unprecedented for a state election.Yet the outcome was emphatic. The Trinamool Congress won 213 seats – nearly 73% of the assembly – while the BJP finished a distant second with 77 seats. Mamata Banerjee, despite losing her own seat in Nandigram to Suvendu Adhikari in a result that remains politically contentious, led her party to a sweeping two-thirds majority. It was among the most comprehensive defeats suffered by the BJP in the Modi era.By 2026, however, both the arithmetic and the method had changed. The arithmetic was simple: despite two determined attempts, the BJP had failed to discover a viable conventional electoral path to power in Bengal. The method had changed even more fundamentally: it no longer needed to.The architecture of controlTo understand what changed between 2021 and 2026, one must first understand what changed in December 2023, when Parliament enacted the Chief Election Commissioners and Other Election Commissioners (Appointment, Conditions of Service and Term of Office) Act.The constitutional position regarding the appointment of the Chief Election Commissioner (CEC) had, for seven decades, remained one of deliberate under-specification. Article 324 merely stated that the CEC and Election Commissioners would be appointed by the President – in practice, acting on the advice of the Prime Minister. No statutory selection process existed, and this institutional gap had long been recognised as a structural vulnerability in India’s constitutional design. The widely held expectation was that any eventual reform would move in the direction of an independent collegium.In March 2023, a five-judge Constitution Bench of the Supreme Court of India intervened. It held that until Parliament enacted a law, appointments to the Election Commission would be made by a committee comprising the Prime Minister, the Leader of the Opposition, and the Chief Justice of India. The inclusion of the Chief Justice was central to the logic of the judgment: it inserted a judicial check upon executive preference in the appointment of those expected to referee the executive’s own electoral contests.Parliament’s response came swiftly in the form of the 2023 Act. The new selection committee consisted of the Prime Minister, a Cabinet Minister nominated by the Prime Minister, and the Leader of the Opposition. Two of the three members were therefore effectively appointees of the executive itself. The Leader of the Opposition retained only a solitary dissenting vote – and little beyond that.That the law was drafted specifically to supersede the Supreme Court’s direction is not a matter of interpretation so much as chronology. The Court said: include the Chief Justice. Parliament responded: exclude the Chief Justice. There is no plausible alternative reading of that sequence.The government proceeded to appoint Gyanesh Kumar as CEC on February 19, 2025, a day after his predecessor retired. Rahul Gandhi formally recorded his dissent. The Supreme Court was scheduled to hear challenges to the law on the very same day. Yet the government moved ahead regardless. Kumar assumed office. The Court did not stay the appointment.What is striking is that none of this was done covertly. It unfolded in full public view: the opposition’s dissent was formally recorded, the constitutional challenge remained pending, and the sequence of events was entirely transparent. The confidence with which the process was carried out is itself revealing. It conveyed not merely institutional control, but the assurance that such control no longer required concealment.Election Commission, the ultimate whipGyanesh Kumar, from virtually his first day in office, appeared through a succession of controversies to confirm the growing apprehension that the ECI was no longer functioning as an independent constitutional authority, but increasingly as an extension of the government itself. The allegations surrounding his tenure concern not merely isolated decisions, but an emerging pattern of institutional partisanship.His tenure soon witnessed unprecedented developments, including an impeachment motion reportedly signed by 193 members of parliament alleging bias, obstruction of investigations, and voter disenfranchisement. Critics pointed particularly to the asymmetric enforcement of the Model Code of Conduct: opposition leaders were promptly served notices for alleged violations, while complaints against Narendra Modi and senior ruling party figures frequently drew little or no visible action.Equally significant was the ECI’s own public posture. Its unusually sharp criticism of opposition parties and its curt dismissal of opposition delegations were widely viewed as departures even from the convention that electoral authorities must at least preserve the appearance of neutrality.These concerns were reinforced by uneven administrative interventions, particularly in West Bengal, where large-scale transfers of officials and selective preventive actions disproportionately affected opposition functionaries – some of which were later stayed by the courts. Earlier controversies surrounding the electoral rolls during the 2024 general election had already contributed to perceptions that the ECI was either unwilling or selective in responding to serious complaints. Even public statements by ruling party leaders crediting the ECI’s role in electoral outcomes strengthened perceptions of institutional proximity between the Commission and the ruling establishment.Taken together, the issue under Kumar’s tenure was not simply the allegation of partisan outcomes. More fundamentally, critics argued, it marked the visible erosion of institutional non-partisanship in the Commission’s conduct itself.Engineering the electorate through SIRUnder the ECI headed by Gyanesh Kumar, virtually every aspect of the electoral process became unprecedentedly contentious. Even the ordinarily routine exercise of revising electoral rolls came to be viewed as politically loaded and structurally biased in favour of the BJP. Critics alleged that the ECI remained unmoved even when evidence of irregularities and fraudulent deletions was presented before it.The so-called Special Intensive Revision (SIR) of electoral rolls, officially justified as an exercise in electoral hygiene, became the central instrument of controversy. In Bihar, nearly 47 lakh voters were reportedly deleted from the rolls, an exercise many opposition parties and analysts believed materially aided the BJP’s electoral victory. The second phase of the SIR was subsequently extended to nine states and three Union Territories.In West Bengal, the process assumed an even larger scale. Nearly 91 lakh voters were reportedly removed from the electoral rolls, reducing the state’s electorate from approximately 7.6 crore in 2024 to 6.7 crore by the time of the election – a decline of nearly 12%. In effect, roughly one in every eight voters disappeared from the rolls before polling began. Analysts alleged that the deletions displayed a discernible political bias favouring the BJP.Particularly controversial was the use, for the first time, of AI-assisted processes in identifying suspect or duplicate entries. Critics argued that the methodology deployed combined technological opacity with glaring logical inconsistencies, producing outcomes that would embarrass even the most ardent advocates of algorithmic governance. The opacity of the process itself made independent verification exceedingly difficult.The Supreme Court of India refrained from staying the SIR exercise, even while acknowledging aspects of the problem and constructing a formal apparatus for remedy. Yet the remedies were effectively rendered inoperative before the very election they were ostensibly meant to safeguard. Whether this reflected institutional incapacity or institutional choice is a conclusion observers may draw for themselves; the practical outcome remained the same either way.During the election itself, West Bengal was transformed into what many described as a virtual war zone. Nearly 480 companies of paramilitary forces were deployed, accompanied by central observers drawn disproportionately from BJP-ruled states. Opposition parties, especially the Trinamool Congress, alleged that the atmosphere created was less one of electoral security than of intimidation and controlled fear.The exercise ultimately culminated in a sweeping BJP victory. Yet much of the political commentary that followed attributed the outcome to a multiplicity of factors – a truism – formulation that, while superficially balanced, often had the effect of normalising the process itself. By refusing to foreground the role of the SIR, the actions and omissions of the ECI, and the judiciary’s unwillingness to intervene decisively, such commentary risked dissolving structural manipulation into the familiar language of electoral analysis. In doing so, it inadvertently reinforced the narrative that what had occurred was merely another instance of democratic politics functioning as usual.The futility of commentary beyond its importWhat the five-state results collectively demonstrate is that the BJP won where it intended to win and conceded where, in its strategic assessment, intervention was either unnecessary or not worth the political cost. Indeed, its defeats in the two southern states arguably served an additional function: they diluted the perception that the BJP wins every election and helped sustain the appearance that Indian democracy remains fundamentally intact.The pattern reveals something more precise. The ECI’s machinery of intervention appears to have been calibrated to the BJP’s political requirements. It is selectively activated. This is the logic not of total control, but of selective control. Total control is brittle: too visible, too crudely fraudulent, too likely to provoke the kind of unified resistance that even a compromised electoral apparatus may struggle to contain. Selective control is far more durable. It permits genuine electoral outcomes where the stakes are low while intervening decisively only where the ruling party considers the outcome strategically indispensable. In this way, the outward architecture of democracy is preserved even as the most consequential electoral contests cease to be genuinely competitive.The BJP does not need to win every election. It only needs to win the elections it cannot afford to lose.Seen from this perspective, the party’s longer-term calculations become clearer. The BJP appears to be positioning itself for the post-delimitation electoral order likely to emerge by 2029. With the parliamentary redistribution expected to significantly enhance the representation of the Hindi heartland – where the BJP remains structurally dominant – the party could potentially secure a durable two-thirds parliamentary majority. With most states already within or adjacent to its political umbrella, it would have similar two-thirds in the Rajya Sabha too. It will have thus parliamentary numbers required for far-reaching constitutional restructuring, including the formal declaation of India as a Hindu Rashtra.Many may continue to quibble about the “basic structure doctrine” as a constitutional safeguard. But constitutions do not defend themselves. Much would depend on the disposition of institutions interpreting them. One can easily imagine a future Supreme Court invoking “the will of the people” as superior to what it may characterise as rigid constitutional formalism.To continue analysing these elections as though they were ordinary democratic contests – to discuss campaign strategies, leadership styles, anti-incumbency trends, or what the opposition might do differently “next time” – is therefore to participate in a fiction increasingly detached from political reality.The central problem is not that opposition parties campaign poorly. It is that the referee itself is batting for the player, while the Supreme Court of India – the only institution constitutionally capable of arresting this transformation—examined the danger, expressed concern about it, and ultimately permitted the process to proceed.Anand Teltumbde is former CEO of PIL, professor of IIT Kharagpur, and GIM, Goa. He is also a writer and civil rights activist.