By Rajan Philips –

Rajan Philips

Prime Minister Modi’s BJP scored a massive victory in the April State Assembly election in West Bengal. With the victory in West Bengal, the BJP now rules every state along the Gangetic plain. “The lotus is blooming from Gangotri to Gangasagar,” Modi told cheering BJP cadres in the party headquarters in Delhi. It is “BJP from Bihar to Bengal,” he went on. The BJP already has a virtual stranglehold over India’s Hindi belt states in the middle and its multilingual western states. Only the south stands out, rebuffing the BJP one more time even while throwing out the incumbent governments in Kerala and Tamil Nadu. The new governments in the two southern states have one thing in common – not to become Modi’s state agents. Of the other three southern states that did not have elections this year, the ruling Telugu Desam Party (TDP) is part of the BJP-led National Democratic Alliance (NDA), while Karnataka and Telangana are governed by the Congress-led Indian National Development Inclusive Alliance (INDIA).

Besides Kerala, Tamil Nadu and West Bengals, this year’s state elections were also held in the smaller state of Assam in northeast, and Union Territory Puducherry near Tamil Nadu. BJP led alliances were in power and were re-elected in both jurisdictions. But it is the victory in West Bengal that has removed from the political scene one of Modi’s and the BJP’s main regional detractors – the defeated West Bengal Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee and her Trinamool Congress. By that measure, the federal check on the Prime Minister, by far the only domestic check on Modi and the BJP government, has been proportionately weakened. More importantly, the defeats of Mamata and Trinamool Congress in West Bengal, and Stalin and the DMK in Tamil Nadu, the struggling opposition alliance INDIA has lost its most seasoned regional heavyweights.

For want of a King

Inasmuch as India is the world’s largest federal parliamentary democracy, it would be interesting, if not instructive, to compare its current situation with the chaotic situations in the US – the world’s oldest, federal and presidential democracy, and in the UK – the world’s oldest parliamentary democracy. Ironically, India and the US are republics while only the UK has a King, but it is the King of England who is now actually protective of parliamentary democracy unlike the Prime Minister of India and the President of the United States. In the case of the United Kingdom, where democracy is well and thriving going by the recent local elections, not even the King can save his beleaguered Prime Minister, Sir Keir Starmer, who is facing expulsion by his Party for the trouncing it got in the local polls and defeats in Scotland and in Wales.

Yes, Scotland and Wales, not to mention England. Unitary Britain is now devolved enough to be federal. To Britain’s further credit, it holds its elections when due regardless of who is in power and regardless of whether the ruling party is in a position to win or lose. Not quite in Sri Lanka, needless to say, the timing of election has become the executive’s prerogative. And in that respect the still new NPP government is no different from every other government – yes – since independence, to recite the NPP mantra, correctly for once. One redeeming difference could be that there seems to be no consultation with astrologers, if indeed it is true.     

That said, Britain’s Starmer is a strange political phenomenon. A highly accomplished lawyer, a Labour activist since his teen years and MP since 2015, duly elected as Labour leader in 2020, and Leader of the Opposition from 2020 to 2024 as the Conservatives descended into chaos in government, Starmer led the Labour Party to a massive victory in 2024 winning 411 of the 585 seats in the House of Commons, and winning in Scotland and Wales as well. But that victory was lopsided – the Labour had won 70% of the seats in parliament with only 34% in the popular vote share. Starmer’s personal popularity was a dismal 5%. A “loveless landslide,” pundits aptly chimed in. The lovelessness is now showing.   

For all his impressive Labour Party resume, Sir Keir Starmer simply lacks the basic political touch with the people. He posses neither the sales charm of Tony Blair or the political heft of Gordon Brown. The lackluster performance of his government was compounded by a grave political misjudgement in the appointment of Labour’s well connected, yet the oldest Party hack, Peter Mandelson as British Ambassador to the US. Mandelson’s nefarious connections to Jeffrey Epstein, the disgraced the American pedophile, shook the British establishment including the Royal Family. Starmer became the whipping boy for all of Britain’s political angsts.

In fairness, Starmer is also symptom of the crisis in British politics, a crisis that is rooted in the country’s sluggish economy and its political ambivalence. To save his bacon, Starmer is literally going back to the future – promising to nationalize steel and vowing to reverse Brexit without undoing it. Obviously, these measures resonate well with the British public. Paradoxically, at the same time, the British voters are not averse to voting for Nigel Farage’s Reform UK, the successor to his Brexit Party that conned old Britishers into leaving the European Union. While Reform’s wins in the local elections are truly impressive, it is also true the combined Labour-Liberal-Green votes easily outnumber Reform’s support. A common electoral alliance of the three would seem logical but may not be feasible.

A leadership battle is brewing in the Labour Party. Starmer seems determined not to quit, despite calls for his departure by four resigning ministers and over 100 MPs. He seems to think that he can withstand a leadership challenge which seems likely to come from the Health Secretary, Wes Streeting. It will be a bruising battle and could turn out to be a pyrrhic victory for the winner. For now, the Prime Minister is going through the motions including the customary King’s Speech delivered on Wednesday laying out the government’s agenda for the new session of parliament.

Before the Labour Party’s local election debacle and the current crisis, the King and Queen of England visited the United States of America to commemorate the 250^th Anniversary of American independence.  Addressing a Joint Session of the Congress on April 28^th, King Charles III evoked the central significance of Magna Carta, the Great English Charter of 1215, for the American Bill of Rights of 1791, and as “the foundation of the principle that Executive power is subject to checks and balances.” The King even noted that Magna Carta has been “cited in at least 160 Supreme Court cases since 1789.”

What the King could obviously not have said is the fact that the hallowed principle of checks and balances involving Executive power is being blatantly violated by America’s president unlike at any time before in the country’s 250 year history. Interestingly, according to the same source that totted up the 160 Supreme Court cases citing Magna Carta, the current Court under CJ John Roberts has not cited the Magan Carta in any of its rulings. Not even in the case involving President Trump and presidential immunity and the ruling in which has given the current incumbent the freedom to act ignoring Congress, and without checks and balances.

Trump has combined and adopted two controversial presidential traditions that arose in the 20^th century. The ‘imperial presidency’ of Richard Nixon that was soon reined in the aftermath of Watergate, and the ‘unitary presidency’ of Ronald Reagan aimed to remove the shackles after Watergate and assert that a president had absolute power over the executive branch. The conservative Supreme Courts judges subscribe to the unitary school and are happy to use their majority to entrench it judicially, while deliberately ignoring Trump’s excesses as passing problems. Trump has chosen imperial bullying as his foreign policy weapon, and ignoring checks and balances for domestic administration.

The war in Iran has exposed Trump’s limitations overseas even as it has worsened his unpopularity at home among all Americans except his core MAGA supporters. The Chinese seem to be making this obvious in the reception they are giving Trump this week in Beijing that is quite a comedown from the grandness of the reception he was given during his first term state visit. Trump would certainly be hoping for China to use its influence on Iran to get a deal to end the war. While the war now appears to be in a prolonged stalemate, there is no respite for the global economy from the crisis that the war has created. Neither Iran nor China is in any hurry to help Trump out. The war is his making and he is wearing the cross for it. He can blame Netanyahu but that will be admitting failure. And the Americans are virtually stuck with him until his term runs out.

In Britain, members of parliament can come together to overthrow an unpopular government, the cabinet of ministers of the Conservative Party can force a Prime Minister to quit, or the  government members of the Labour Party can get rid of their Prime Minister by forcing a leadership contest. By rule and convention, the parliamentary system provides such flexibilities between elections. There is always the risk of revolving door Prime Ministers as it has happened with the Conservative Party government in 2022. But no British Prime Minister can wreak havoc and stay in power for his full term, as President Trump is proving to be in the US. The November midterm elections to Congress are widely expected to flip control of the House to Democrats, and potentially of the Senate as well. Both assemblies are under Republican control now and Trump has dictatorial power over the Republican Party in both the House and the Senate. There is no separation of powers and there are checks and balances at the federal level on the executive.          

To avoid Democrats taking control of the House in November, Trump is forcing the states under Republican governments to rejig electoral boundaries and regulate voting rights by insisting on impractical identification and location requirements. The Supreme Court has taken a hands off approach to these matters by conveniently calling them political issues. Put another way, rights can be denied so long as they are a political matter. But Trump is not having his way as not all the Republican states are ready to do the President’s bidding. And the states under Democrats are doing their own rejigging, and the whole political system is narcissistically caught up in this electoral mayhem. There is little space, time and urgency left in the two-party political system to deal with ‘the excursion’ in Iran and its crippling economic effects on the world.   

India’s Midterm

In India, on the other hand, to complete the circle of my detour today, Prime Minister Modi and the BJP government would seem to have been able to execute, rather easily, election interferences in some of the state assembly elections – that President Trump is unable to achieve in time for the November midterm elections in America. The Election Commission of India, traditionally one of the more trusted public institutions in the country, has recently been facing allegations of fraud, manipulation, and tampering with electoral lists to remove real names and fake names. These misdoings are also alleged to have been undertaken by election officials to favour the ruling BJP government.

These allegations first surfaced before the assembly elections in Bihar last year, and are now alleged to have been a major faction in West Bengal elections this April. Central to these allegations is the Special Intensive Revision process that is used to update electoral lists by verifying voter information, including relocations, deaths etc. In Bihar, the intensively revised new voter list showed 72.4 million voter names – 6.5 million fewer than the previous list. The publication of the omitted names and opportunity to appeal have not been straightforward. The BJP/NDA won the November 2025 election in Bihar with 202 out 243 seats, and BJP alone won the largest number of seats for the first time in Bihar. The defeated opposition contended that the SIR scheme played a role in the BJP’s runaway victory.

Bihar’s electoral experience repeated itself in West Bengal this year and with even more allegations about the Special Intensive Revision process. The BJP/NDA won 207 seats out of the total 294 seats, with Trinamool (grassroots) Congress winning 80 seats, and Bengal’s once mighty Communist Party, under a very popular Chief Minister Jyoti Basu for over 30 years, reduced to a humiliating single seat. The SIR disputants contend that in over 100 seats that BJP won, the number of voters eliminated by SIR is greater than the difference in the number of votes between the BJP and Trinamool. Modi and the BJP also played the anti-Muslim card vigorously, raising the spectre of illegal Muslim migrants from Bangladesh. The same anti-Muslim playbook of Trump and every other right wingnut in Europe.

Perhaps for the first time in forty years, the same political party is in government in Delhi and in Kolkata, and it creates a new dynamic for the triangular relationship between India, West Bengal and Bangladesh. Through the early partition of Bengal and the later bifurcation of the two distant (East and West) wings of Pakistan, the cross-border Hindu-Muslim populations of the two countries have maintained their cultural affinities and even established a sizable informal economy between them. The concern now is that if the relationship between Delhi and Dhaka were to deteriorate that could impact the livelihood of millions of people who now straddle the border for economic survival.

In the two southern states of Kerala and Tamil Nadu, the incumbent governments were thrown out, but with a difference in what replaced them. In Kerala, the Communist Party Marxist (CPM) and to a far lesser extent, the Communist Party of India (CPI) have maintained their strong bases unlike their rather corrupt comrades in West Bengal. Elections have periodically swung between the Left Democratic Front (LDF) of the two Communist Parties and smaller parties, on the one hand, and the United Democratic Front (UDF) led by the Congress Party on the other. The LDF won the last two elections and was hoping for a threepeat.

The voters thought otherwise and gave the reins to the UDF with a convincing 97 out of 140 seats. Kerala now turns out to be the most secular political home for the Indian National Congress, once the great banyan tree of all political organizations in India. Nehru once declared without exaggeration: “ India is the Congress, the Congress is India.” The greater historical irony is that it was Rahul Gandh’s grandmother Indira Gandhi, as Congress President without in any elected position,  who manipulated the presidential expulsion of Kerala’s, and the world’s, first elected Communist Government led by EMS Namboodiripad in 1959.

Tamil Nadu is a different story and is literally writing a new script after electing actor-turned politician Joseph Vijay and his Tamilaga Vettri Kazhagam (Tamil Nadu Victory Party) with the largest majority – 108 out of 234 seats, 10 seats below the required majority. For the first time in in nearly 60 years, there will be a new government in Tamil Nadu without either of the Dravidian duo – the DMK or its alter ego ADMK. The ruling DMK was widely expected to win, and Chief Minister Stalin had run an efficient administration. But allegations of corruption involving the Karunanidhi family, in spite of the Chief Minister, a sense of boredom among otherwise well ensconced young voters would seem to have propelled the matinee star to the seat of power. He is now in government with the support of the Congress Party and the two Communist Parties. But there are two scripts to the State of Tamil Nadu: the political script that is theatrical as well as reformist, and the economic script that is all business. Tamil Nadu is perhaps the only state in India where caste groups belonging to the ‘backward classes’ have been dominating politics for 70 years. At the same time, Tamil Nadu is one of the strongest economies in India. These aspects are usually lost in many of the Sri Lankan commentaries on Tamil Nadu politics.