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- [00:00]
Princeton University Press Announcer
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Gilles Vernier
some books welcome to the New Books Network.
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Maya Tudor
Welcome to Democracy Dialogues, a podcast from Cornell University's Brooks School of Public Policy center on Democracy. Co hosted by the Blavatnik School of Government at the University of Oxford. This podcast brings cutting edge research on democracy to a broad audience, including practitioners, journalists, students and citizens who care about the future of democratic government. In each episode we ask about new books, research and reports, discussing what they reveal about the challenges that democracies are facing today and the opportunities for citizens to contribute to democracies deepening I'm Maya Tudor and today we're discussing the results and implications of India's 2026 state elections. Earlier this month, across a range of Indian states, voters delivered a set of results that were mixed, but that many are arguing is also deeply consequential. The incumbent national government bjp made major gains in some areas, including a breakthrough victory in West Bengal while retaining states like Assam, and regional and opposition parties either held ground or rebounded in states like Tamil Nadu and Kerala. What do we make of these trends and what do they mean about the state of India's democracy? Today? We have two especially sharp observers of Indian politics, Gilles Vernier and Yamini Iyer. Gilles is a political scientist currently affiliated with center for South Asia at Stanford University, and the Diamini is a visiting professor of practice at the Watson School of International and Public affairs at Brown University. Yamini and Gill, welcome to Begin for listeners who may not know much about Indian politics, but who care deeply about the state of democracy in the world, how should they interpret the results of the state elections in in one sentence and Yemeni, Can I start with you?
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Yamini Iyer
Well, I think that they should worry because the elections were preceded by a set of actions by central state institutions, particularly the Election Commission that is meant to be the objective arbiter of the election process, conducting a revision of electoral roles in ways that were fundamentally opaque, deeply troubling, and created mass Disenfranchisement of a large number of Indian citizens, regardless of the outcome and churning of political parties in the electoral process. The fact that over 3 million registered voters were disenfranchised in the state of West Bengal and several others had to go through all kinds of loops and hoops in the other states states to participate, but also to be knocked off the electoral roles in a non transparent and haphazard manner leaves a lot of questions to be desired about the process of electoral democracy. And when the process of elections has a cloud, elections themselves can be challenged.
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Maya Tudor
That was a very long sentence.
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Yamini Iyer
Heming.
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Maya Tudor
Gilles, can I turn to you?
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Yamini Iyer
No, no, no.
- [04:42]
Maya Tudor
I think it's important to start. But not all of our listener know a lot about Indian politics. So you know, why are these consequential? Is important to get kind of the broad sense. How about you? How should they interpret?
- [04:56]
Gilles Vernier
So my answer is that these results should be interpreted with the greatest caution. What may appear to be a clear result is in fact completely muddied by the institutional interventions on the electoral in the weeks that even preceded the election. And my view does not differ much from.
- [05:18]
Maya Tudor
Yeah, many. Yeah, yeah. So Yamini, you've written a lot about Indian federalism and one thing that immediately stood out was how varied the outcomes were across the states that had elections. There was BJP expansion in some place, but strong regional resilience in others. So how do we think about the state of Indian federalism and what it says about democracy in light of those varied results?
- [05:46]
Yamini Iyer
Well, at one level, what's really important to state up front is one of the most powerful aspects of Indian federalism is that it is designed to privilege multiplicities of political identities within the broader rubric of the nation state of India. And if you take a kind of broad view of this election, in some senses the results almost mirrored type in that the political identities of subnational identities, of the Tamilian identity, the Malayali identity, were victorious over the BJP's very majoritarian imagination of a one nation in which one identity should trump all the multiplicities of identities. At the same time, one has to look towards the east of India, Bengal and Assam. And what's really interesting and important to recognize about both these elections in that part of the country is that these are parts of India where again, multiplicities of identities have always competed with each other and engaged with each other almost in some form of dialogue. Assam is particularly interesting where both religious identities as well as ethnic identities have played important roles in shaping the politics of the state. But over the last decade, as the BJP took over its majoritarian view, kind of in some very intriguing ways flattened these multiplicities of identities and converted them into these polarized binaries of Hindu Muslim. Ten years ago you would not talk about Assamese politics in terms of Hindu Muslim religious polarization. You would speak about it in terms of multiplicities of identity in which there were polarization. Similarly in West Bengal, where the electoral rolls process that Bojean and I just spoke about was used in ways, in my reading, almost weaponizing them to polarize on communal lines, the Bengali identity and convert what could have been an election. On many things. It's important to state that there was a lot of anti incumbency as far as the existing subnational party called the TMC was concerned. But it made the election very much about issues of polarization and Hindu consolidation rather than an election that was essentially meant to be ought to have been rather a verdict on governance.
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Maya Tudor
So let me pick up on these multiplicities of identity point with Gilles. Is it the case that these elections can effectively be read as a referendum on the BJP and Modi? Because one of the arguments you were just making, Yamini, is that it didn't used to be the case that an election in Assam was about national level politics. But in a sense that's what I hear you saying. Julie, do you want to comment on that point?
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Gilles Vernier
Well, I mean, something that we've seen in elections over the past years is that they're necessarily a mix of national and state factors, right? It's not an either or situation. It's not about purely state level politics and it's not straightforward referendum on Modi even of course, if Modi and national politics looms large on the elections. So if we sort of unpack this, on the one hand, of course there are state level dynamics clearly at work. The Trinamul Congress, the DMK in Tamil Nadu, they had been both in power for around 15 years each and as Yamini said, some degree of anti incumbency was to be expected. The Trina Modi in particular was contending with widespread allegations of corruption and an economy that had not kept pace with other states. So these are quintessentially state level factors. But on the other hand, the BJP ran explicitly national campaigns in Assam and Bengal centered not on local governance, not on development, but on communal polarization and specifically the association of Muslim voters with Bangladeshi illegal immigrants. The Prime Minister's own campaign revisiting temples on voting day, for example, combined with the VIRULENT rhetoric from sitting chief ministers, BJP party leaders who openly declared that they did not want a Muslim vote at all, that gave these elections a distinctly national normative character. It sends also a signal beyond those state elections. It's worth mentioning that the BJP nominated zero Muslim candidate in two states where Muslim constitutes 27 to 34% of the population. And that's a national political strategy which has been enforced since 2014 with very few exceptions. But again, before this question of national versus state factors, it's the structural dimension that seems really important here. The SRD sir, which was conducted by a nominally independent election.
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Maya Tudor
Can I just ask you, though, for our listeners who don't know what the SIR is, can you just say a word about what it is? Because you and Yani both mentioned it.
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Gilles Vernier
So the special intensive revision of the electoral roll is a large scale cleanup of electoral lists, which differs from the usual routine maintenance of electoral roll by literally knocking door to door to verify if voters say who they say they are, whether they still live where they say they live, whether they're still alive. And it's an exercise that had not happened for more than 20 years, which is a very large scale, extremely complex process, which in the present case was set up or is being set up literally at the eve of elections, rather than do it, you know, with a lot of time. And so this revision exercise was haphazard, it was selective, it was concentrated in opposition strongholds, it was open to arbitrary execution. And in the case of Bengal, it was quite clearly discriminatory in the end towards Muslim voters. And so that introduced a new national level variable of factor that distorts whatever state level verdict might have emerged. So it does not necessarily reverse the results, but it denies citizens the clarity they need to recognize the results as being completely legitimate. And that sort of trumps the question whether state factors or national factors predominate. There's an institutional factor that predominates here.
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Yamini Iyer
Maya, can I just very quickly add two more things here? One, so the SIR is an extremely important issue, as Ajeel just described. One aspect of that, particularly in the state of West Bengal, was what it did to the local discourse by using this mechanism to cast suspicion around citizenship. Essentially, it is the state coming out saying, I want to verify documents. And it opened up the space to argue that the need to verify these documents comes from the fact that there's a lot of quote, unquote, illegal movement of people across the border. West Bengal and Assam are on the border of Bangladesh. And that notion of the idea that there are Illegal migrants entering into, across, entering in through the borders and then voting to kind of to present themselves as citizens and then access welfare benefits was a very effective way of creating a polarized discourse around the elections. And you can see how Hindu consolidation kind of works around that. The second issue that we haven't mentioned, but it's worth recognizing, this may not have been pivotal to shaping the outcome of the election, but it was critical to how the election was managed in the state of Assam. The election commission redrew the constituencies, the border, the territorial constituencies in the state. There was very obvious gerrymandering such that the constituencies were polarized to have some that were Muslim dominated, none of whom voted for the BJP and others that weren't last the use of central forces. In West Bengal, days before the election, actual voting, large numbers of central forces turned up. It was a way of kind of asserting the presence of the national government and in a very subtle way, instead inserting the national government into what ought to have been a sub national, state specific election.
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Maya Tudor
So I want to pick up on this point because it's a part of the way we see democracy declining. For those political scientists who say it is declining around the world, they see the decline exactly in this kind of, you know, it's not tanks rolling through the street, but it's a sort of shrinking of who gets to speak, despite citizenship being not necessarily the only thing that matters for whether you get to cast your ballot and your ballot is heard or the voice of citizens are heard. So what do you say to somebody who says, well, look, in fact, we've heard this argument. So I just want again, for people who don't understand the intricacies of. Sir and Gilles, you mentioned that it, you know, it's an incredibly complicated process, but there are people who say that these electoral rules do need to be updated, that there, you know, that there are problems with it as it is. So in particular, and Yamini, I know that you have written about this in some of your articles on this and maybe we can, you can say a little bit on this. You know, how do we know that this isn't a legitimate exercise in taking somebody who might have migrated or who might have, you know, passed away and excising from the roles of voters.
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Yamini Iyer
Should I quickly jump? Yes, please. Yes. Okay. So let's put it this way. The entire process still today hasn't given we as citizens of this country. We still don't have any official reason for, for why the government decided. The election commission rather decided that it needs to do the Special intensive revision of electoral rolls. Now the first sighting of this took place In June of 2025, a few months before a crucial state in northeast in the eastern part of India, Bihar was going to election in November. The process began in June. Multiple Right to Information, Freedom of Information applications have been filed to ask for reasons why the Election Commission felt that a sir needs to be done today. Till date we do not know. The process itself was extremely non transparent and haphazard. In Bihar, the Supreme Court had to intervene to put some guardrails on how the Election Commission was going about this process. The same thing got repeated in West Bengal as well. But what made the West Bengal issue much more complicated is that in West Bengal, having gone through the first round of electoral revision which led to the knocking off of over a crore of people who were on the list, they then introduced something called logical discrepancy, an algorithm. The basis of the algorithm is still not clearly out in the public domain. It took the Supreme Court to ask questions of the Election Commission on the basis of which the numbers were whittled down. But still a significant number, about 60 lakhs were left out and all of those 27 lakhs were not allowed to vote. They were disenfranchised. And our Supreme Court because this whole issue went to the courts. One of the justices said in the run up because suddenly the election is also coming and they announced the elections before the cleanup was actually fully completed and the lists were out. Said well perhaps they won't be able to vote this time around. They'll always be next time. There is something deeply problematic about a process that doesn't have clarity on why is non transparent, haphazard, complicated in its implementation and results in active disenfranchisement with very different rules that are being deployed in states. So West Bengal has a Sir, Tamil Nadu and Kerala do two. It's the logical discrepancy algorithm is not introduced there. We do not know why Sam did not have a special intensive review. They had something called an intensive review. Again, as a citizen, the question is why are you doing different things in different places which leave many questions open.
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Maya Tudor
So just, you know, different practices in different places, a lack of transparency about the process itself, a lack of recourse, at least easy recourse. And you know we had Yogendra Yadav on an earlier episode of this show and one of the things he said is it's part of a broader transformation in which Indians used to count on essentially the electoral mechanism coming to them if they were in Remote reaches. And the onus is now switching that you have to sort of prove that you're eligible to vote and that advantages certain kinds of people. And so, Gilles, I want to come to you on just stepping back again and thinking about what this election means for the state of Indian democracy. So, you know, particularly because there are political scientists such as Adam Zaworski who are arguing, look, democracy is robust. We are seeing electoral turnover when we look around the world. And so, you know, as somebody who's thinking about and reading and in the discipline of political science, both those debates, but who's observing India so closely, what do you think about the question of whether Indian democracy is really in trouble, stepping back from the question of these kind of electoral roll revisions in light of the elections?
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Gilles Vernier
So, look, there's no doubt that government turnover is a feature of a functioning democracy, right? But that said, the legitimacy of an election does not depend solely on its outcome, but on the quality of the process that led to that outcome. And if that process itself is vitiated, if elections are not held in satisfactory, satisfactory conditions, then why would turnover be enough to state the robustness of a democracy? So Przybowski test is minimalist, and in the present case, I think quite insufficient. Democracy is not only about whether the incumbent can lose on the lay of counting, it's about whether the conditions for fair competition hold through the electoral chain, to use Pipanori's expression. So when scholars began writing about democratic backsliding in India some years ago, they initially argued that India was a robust electoral democracy, but with a liberal deficit. It had free and fair elections, but it had serious issues of illiberal governance. Then the BJP grew. It concentrated resources, it exerted greater control over the media, over opposition voices, civil society. It used the. The repressive arms of the state to alter the condition of electoral competitions. So India no longer had free and fair competition, but there was still faith overall in the process because the election commission was there to guarantee it. But then we saw the election commission acting in a more partisan manner, selectively enforcing the model code of conduct according to the offenders party affiliation. The government also changed the mode of appointment of commissioners, giving the executive a greater role. And so the election commission gradually began taking decisions that at times seemed inexplicable or arbitrary or appear to create an electoral advantage for the bjp. The scheduling of elections, the determination of how many phases elections should be held, and so forth. And then it begins implementing the sir and it disrupts the electoral process by making these massive changes to the electoral roll sometimes weeks before election take place. And that of course reinforces the suspicion that the sir is not a neutral, regular sort of cleaning exercise. The sir in Bihar showed that the process affected the poor more adversely then the election commission declared that the sir was also an instrument for verifying citizenship, which aligns with government policy but does not fall within its mandate. And so all of a sudden, millions of people had to scramble to produce papers to prove not just that they were regular voters, but that they were citizens. And then we come to Bengal where the process clearly creates an electoral advantage by targeting more minorities, urban voters, by being conducted with greater zeal in trainable strongholds, by giving institutional backing to the claim that the BJP makes about Muslim voters and illegal immigration and infiltrators and so forth. And so now we have a situation where the electoral process itself has become severely vitiated. And this is not to say that the election commission sort of clung the election for the BJP. No, right. But the wrongful deletion of at least 3 million voters muddies the process and therefore the result. And at minimum, it is an institutional failure. So to answer your question, I would say that India is in a category that democratic theory has not fully caught up with. There are elections. Elections continue, competition continues in pockets. But the architecture of fair competition is being systematically reshaped in ways that, if unchecked, will continue to produce problematic outcomes, even illegitimate one. I have to say that we know that backsliding is a very slow process of erosion. But today it really feels that we've entered a new political reality. This movement is different from earlier episodes of disputed elections, allegations of frauds which were localized. These were forms of electoral malpractice that took place on the numerator on registered voters. Here the manipulation takes place on the denominator, the electoral list itself. And India has never faced at this scale the systematic re engineering of who gets to participate before even a single ballot is cast.
- [25:31]
Maya Tudor
So it's like there's a chess game being played, but the opposition is sort of. It's that the chessboard is no longer flat and it's really being institutionally tilted so that the ability to kind of come out and challenge is, you know, it's just fighting a harder center of gravity, which means that electoral turnover is still possible, but the bar to pass often has to be a lot higher. But Yemeni, it did pass the bar in some states in these elections. And I want to ask you the question of why it is that some states follow a different trajectory. Why is it that Tamil Nadu and Kerala appear to be relatively resistant to this march of dominance at the state level by the bjp. Is it, you know, is it about party systems? Is it about a different political culture? Is it something else?
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Yamini Iyer
Well, look, the BJP was very, very categorically focused on building its in roads in West Bengal. It nearly made it in the five years ago in the 2021 election. It lost ground in the general election in 2024 and then it kind of went all out and made it in the 2026 election. So the BJP, it's a party machine that works carefully and effectively through legitimate and clearly very, very legitimate means to acquire dominance wherever it can find a vulnerability and an opportunity and it grabs it. Tamil Nadu and Kerala, like West Bengal, have a very strong sub national identity. And in fact one of the big challenges for the BJP in West Bengal was whether or not the BJP is one national, one nationism, federal impatience politics would be able to make this breakthrough in West Bengal. Clearly it has, it has made its efforts both in Tamil Nadu and in Kerala and it has in both places increased its vote share. And it also by the way, has played very illegitimate games, particularly in Tamil Nadu. So Tamil Nadu was a duopoly of two Dravidian parties, the DMK and the aidmk. And it's really been a competition between these two with national parties kind of attaching themselves on the coattails of either
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Maya Tudor
one of these parties.
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Yamini Iyer
The entire, the history, the politics, its notion of regional identity and religious identity are very different to many other parts of North India. And so the classic template of BJP's Hindutva hasn't worked as effectively in these two places. But Tamil nad suddenly gets this film actor who sets up a political party and surprises everybody with this phenomenal electoral outcome where he falls just 18 seats short of a majority to take over the government. The governor, that's an instrument of the bj, of the national government in India as a structure of our constitution and is often very politicized, ought to have by all constitutional means invited the majority party to come and form government and then have a test of confidence in the legislative assembly. The governor waited for inexplicable reasons for the better part of three or four days for all kinds of political machinations to unfold. And this is completely unconstitutional. So again you can see the BJP using all forms of its national powers over national state institutions to kind of manipulate and play. So it's trying different things. And it, and, and, and you know, it really is about how these, oh
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Maya Tudor
dear, we seem to have lost Yemeni. Yes, Jill, do you want to pick up here?
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Gilles Vernier
Yes. I mean, can I. Can I add that, you know, can I add that? You know, what I find significant is that over the past 12 years, the parties that have resisted the most or the most effectively to the BJP have tended to be regionalist parties that incarnate and defend a particular regional identity. When the DMKA fights against the BJP in a general election, it becomes a clash of civilizations, Right. Between a northern political force and a southern Dravidian identity. So in the case of Tamil nad, that has not disappeared. I mean, we still trying to figure out who Vijay is, what does he stand for, but it does not represent a rupture of Dravidian politics. A Dravidian party may have lost the election, but Dravidian politics is still very much there. Bengal is a very different story, and that will lead to very deep sociopolitical change in the state, I think. Yamini?
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Maya Tudor
Yes, sorry.
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Yamini Iyer
I just wanted to say, I think what's also important for us to pay attention to is that that the form of authoritarianism, or Hindutva as we call it, that has been practiced in North India is a little bit different to the form of Hindutva that is unfolding in Assam and West Bengal, where the BJP has now built such deep inroads in the sense that the question of citizenship and introduced citizenship wasn't tested in the first phase of Hindutva dominance in North India, where it was very much a of assertion Hindu identity through things like the Ayodhya temple and the dispute over the mosque in Ayodhya, a uniform civil code and the question of differential powers in Kashmir with Article 370. What is being tested now in Assam's call is much deeper form of Hindutva which is substantively changing the fundamental nature of our constitutional contract of equals ship by introducing religion as a test and placing the oath of citizenship upon individuals who have access to government documents. It's a very different kind of Hindutva that is being played. And so you see these adjustments. The BJP is agile in how it tests Hindutva. It experiments with Hindutva, but fundamentally the core of its politics of a Hindu identity as being the first and quantity of India and all other identities being subservient to it is what's at play.
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Maya Tudor
Yeah. So one question for Gilles before I ask each of you a closing question. So, Gilles, I want to. It's a really nice follow up on where Yamini just left off, which is about the source of the BJP appeal itself. So, you know, it's test in. Yemeni just told us different iterations of Hindu nationalism and understanding what works in different regions. But for the voters who are voting for the bjp, is it, is it the case that the party's success rests on, you know, these kind of welfare schemes that it was. It's Hindu nationalism. It's a combination. How do we think about the relative weight of these factors?
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Gilles Vernier
So we know that Indian elections are never fought or won on a single factor. But clearly there are elections where certain factors predominate. In the case of Assam in Bengal, the BJP campaign started and ended with communalism, which is not to say that other socioeconomic factors don't intervene. What has. So I mean, on welfare, really, Yemeni should answer the question. But, but over the years, parties have become less and less distinguishable in terms of the welfare promises that they make. If you read manifestos, I mean, you could almost switch party names and it would not make major differences with regard at least to the welfare or the redistributive section of these manifestos. And so Banu Joshi was a political scientist, has a really nice formulation. Welfare used to be the ceiling of politics, now it becomes the floor. Right. And so therefore, if everybody promises the same thing, if everybody engages with the same form of, you know, individualized and taken hands, you know, welfarism, then you need something else to distinguish and to answer your question, what creates the appeal? It's nationalism. Right. Of a particular ethnic and religious time, but type. But we really cannot overwrite the importance of nationalist appeal in times that are troubled, in times that are difficult, in times where people struggle to find job, to keep job, where there's an international environment that is very. Also uncertain. And so the sirens of nationalism have their own, Own appeal.
- [35:19]
Maya Tudor
Right? Yeah. Let me ask each of you the same closing question in our last couple minutes. What is the. The aspect of this, not just the election results, but stepping back, what gives you the greatest optimism and what is the greatest source of concern when we think about Indian democracy for the next decade? Yemeni, let me start with you.
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Yamini Iyer
I think the Indian voter is well aware of all that is going on and makes choices, recognizing what political parties are doing and when options are presented to the Indian voter, that affords the possibility of something radical and different. They're going for it. Viv is a really good example of that. So my greatest source of optimism comes from the Indian that, as Gilles very evocatively put it, the denominator is shifting. The active effort to disenfranchise The Indian voter tilts the balance in ways that make it harder for the Indian voter to make her voice heard. But I remain hopeful because the Indian voter is a genuinely wise voter and deeply democratic one.
- [36:40]
Gilles Vernier
Right, okay. Let me invert the order of my response so that we can end on a positive note.
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Maya Tudor
Great.
- [36:48]
Gilles Vernier
So I think I've been clear about my concerns. It's what I would call the architecture problem. So India has navigated disputed elections, even boycotts, accusation of frauds and malpractice for 75 years because the foundational problem premise that the electorate that voted is roughly the electorate that was supposed to vote held. And that premise has now been broken in Bengal at a scale that's genuinely unprecedented. And if the election commission continues to function as a political instrument in administrative clothing, and if the opposition remains as decimated as it currently is, the next decade will really test whether Indian democracy's resilience is structural or just circumstantial. On the positive side, Indian state politics can always produce genuine surprises. New parties can emerge. Voters can still make choices that confound national narratives. Of course, I'm thinking of Tamil Nadu or TVK's stunning performance. Indian voters always have the capacity to surprise analysts. They really resist predictability. And finally, another source of optimism is the transformation that are taking place locally. There are dynamics at work that have completely escaped the attention of political scientists. We ran a survey, Susan Osterman and I, recently, across Panchayat in Haryana, and it revealed that many women contest in unreserved seats against men and win, contrary to popular imagination. So if we stick to. If we look more closely at voters and at democratic practices that in a way matter the most at the most local level, we see that there's a sea of change taking place that. That we're not paying sufficient attention to.
- [38:38]
Maya Tudor
Great. Well, Yamini and Jill, thank you very much for joining us on Democracy Dialogues.
- [38:44]
Gilles Vernier
Thank you for having us.
- [38:45]
Yamini Iyer
Thank you for having us.
- [38:47]
Rachel Beatty Rito
And that's all for today's episode of Democracy Dialogues from Cornell University's Brooks center on Global Democracy. We hope you enjoyed the conversation and continue to join us in thinking about the challenges and possibilities for democracy today. You can find our episodes on our YouTube channel, NBN website, social media, or wherever you listen to your podcasts. Thanks to our guests today and thanks to you, our audience, for listening. I'm Rachel Beatty Rito, and we'll be back soon with another dialogue on democracy. Until then, stay engaged, stay informed, and stay committed to democratic dialogue.
- [39:43]
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Yamini Iyer
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Yamini Iyer
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Gilles Vernier
Maybe there's no catch.
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Yamini Iyer
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Gilles Vernier
You need to relax.
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Maya Tudor
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Maya Tudor
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