The BJP has come out of the political turmoil smelling of roses, maybe lotuses. It hasn’t opened its gates to defectors. Its purity in its June 2026 avatar is intact; despite the past defections and additions like Jyotiraditya Scindia in 2020 or the seven AAP Rajya Sabha members in 2026
The law, intrusive some would argue, has made declaration of purpose imperative; breakups must also follow a certain etiquette. The Uniform Civil Code in three BJP-ruled states, Gujarat, Uttarakhand and Assam, makes it mandatory for live-in partners to register the relationship and notify breakups. There are also provisions for a woman deserted and the children of such relationships.
As a stickler for the right way of doing things in partnerships, the BJP has set a minimum standard; its conduct in dealing with political partnerships is a newly-minted manual. At the end of the short thriller, two bloodless coups have been neatly executed, with the merger of 20 TMC putschists with an entirely obscure unregistered party, the Nationalist Citizen’s Party of India, and six Shiv Sena MPs who broke away from the Uddhav Thackeray-led party, and there are rumours of a third breakup underway within Akhilesh Yadav’s Samajwadi Party.
The BJP has come out of the political turmoil smelling of roses, maybe lotuses. It hasn’t opened its gates to defectors. Its purity in its June 2026 avatar is intact; despite the past defections and additions like Jyotiraditya Scindia in 2020 or the seven AAP Rajya Sabha members in 2026.
Presumably, it is unconnected with the coups staged by “rebels” in the recently-defeated Trinamul Congress, from the parliamentary party in New Delhi and with the other lot, the “rebels” in the West Bengal Assembly. It can maintain, albeit strictly for the record, deniability in aiding and abetting the coups in the TMC and the Shiv Sena (UBT).
The consequences proceeding from the breakups have been neatly packaged. No messes please, we are Bharatiya, just like in the breakups supervised under the UCC in BJP-ruled states. The BJP gets to maintain its purity, unpolluted by the entry of defectors. The putschists get a new name and a new party and all is well.
The BJP remains 43 MPs short of a two-thirds majority for the ruling NDA in the 543-member Lok Sabha. But it’s getting closer to that mark of 362 MPs. The party’s seat count is still at 240 MPs, meaning it continues to be in the minority, but its new allies have boosted its numbers, from 293 NDA MPs in 2024 to 319 MPs in 2026.
The NCPI is the BJP’s newest and biggest NDA partner with 20 seats, ahead of the Telegu Desam; the Shiv Sena putschists are its smallest ally, with six MPs, and the BJP has rapidly moved forward without benefit of any kind of legitimisation, that is by elections, to get closer to a two-thirds Lok Sabha majority. The BJP needs the numbers to recover from its humiliating defeat in the Lok Sabha and the Rajya Sabha on April 17, bang in the middle of the scorching Assembly elections in West Bengal, Tamil Nadu, Kerala and Assam. If that was the BJP’s hubris moment, the bloodless coups staged within the TMC and the Shiv Sena (UBT) are like a punch; energy-booster drinks that improve performance and add muscle to an already well-crafted body.
Distracting as the fast-paced vivisection of the TMC was, the endgame is not yet evident. Why is the BJP in this almighty hurry to try and scramble together a two-thirds majority in Parliament?
By the reckoning of all political pundits, the BJP needs the numbers added by the putschists to push through the Women’s Reservation Amendment Bill, bringing forward the date and compensating the male MPs by adding more seats to the Lok Sabha, the Rajya Sabha and the state Assemblies. It is perfectly possible to weave an explanation on the basis of patriarchy’s deep-rooted and devious ways of preventing women from acquiring an abbreviated and therefore dubious “equality,” or at least the first step forward to that unreachable goal.
The reservation of one-third of seats in all directly elected and indirectly elected legislatures is not equality for women; it is a lollipop. It is expected to temporarily transform the BJP from defenders and custodians of patriarchy into a liberal woman-friendly inclusive institution.
The explanation would be wrong, and on many counts. Hitching women’s reservation to expansion of the number of elected representatives negates the cost of empowering women. On the contrary, by lumping the two, the BJP as the sponsor of the amendments, gets to do something on the quiet, which is “gerrymandering”, by which one political party gets a hugely disproportionate advantage over its rivals by redrawing boundaries of electoral constituencies, by simply diverting attention to the obvious, that is an increase in seats, which also, incidentally, gives some states a disproportionate advantage over others.
Dressed up in the rhetoric of Hindu majoritarianism and designed to provoke the other side to react with emotionally laden opposition to an alleged plan to shrink Muslim representation, the redrawing of boundaries that is axiomatic following delimitation serves a bigger purpose; gerrymandering to give the BJP political advantage against all existing and future rivals in electoral contests in the near future. It does raise the question: why is the BJP so uncertain about its popular appeal after the 2026 Assembly elections?
Having more or less steered the Special Intensive Revision of electoral rolls in 14 states and Union territories to delete about six crore voters from the voters list, the BJP, as the ruling party that supports “DETECT, DELETE, DEPORT” of ineligible voters, has no reason to feel anxious that “ghuspaithiyas”, or illegal Muslim/Bangladeshi/Rohingya immigrants, would alter either the demographics or voters’ choice across the country. Its target of consolidation of Hindu voters by making the SIR process into a detection of illegal Muslim voters, whether they are citizens or migrants, has been served.
Delimitation and redrawing of electoral constituencies is a complicated statistical exercise. If the BJP has indeed set its sights on doing just that through the constitutional amendment route, it points to a level of preparedness that is as unnerving as it is unmatchable by any one Opposition party or even all of them put together. The Opposition, quite apart from preventing its own dismemberment, has to do more than follow the beaten track of hurling invectives and issuing dire warnings against the BJP, collectively and or separately. It has to measure the threat, for starters, which includes mapping the threat in all its complexities. By breaking down the problem into bite-size pieces, the Opposition can then think of how it can nibble at the edges. Reflection rather than reaction is how the Opposition can deal with the new chapter in the BJP’s political manual of how to win friends and influence voters.
Shikha Mukerjee is a senior journalist in Kolkata
