Dear Reader,

This week has been hectic. Election results from four States—West Bengal, Tamil Nadu, Kerala, and Assam—and one Union Territory, Puducherry, have pushed the political temperature through the roof. Alongside the celebrations and recriminations came the inevitable noise, some of it entirely justified, especially around the highly disputed Special Intensive Revision (SIR) of electoral rolls.

Mamata Banerjee refused to resign after her party’s defeat, setting off cries of a constitutional crisis. Rahul Gandhi doubled down on his vote chori campaign. Addressing the press on May 5, the Trinamool chief said: “I will not resign, I did not lose, I will not go to Raj Bhavan. We didn’t lose the election. Officially, through the Election Commission, they can defeat us, but morally, we won the election.” Calling the Chief Election Commissioner “the villain of this election”, she also raised doubts over electronic voting machines.

What caught my attention, though, were the defeats of opposition Chief Ministers and chief ministerial faces in their own bastions: Mamata in Bhabanipur in West Bengal, M.K. Stalin in Kolathur in Chennai, and Congress leader Gaurav Gogoi in Jorhat in Assam.

The BJP clearly went after the heads of rival camps. Somewhere in the party machinery, someone took the old maxim about love and war rather seriously. There has never been much love between the BJP and the opposition; this election supplied enough war for several seasons.

In a stunning upset, Stalin lost Kolathur by 8,795 votes to Tamilaga Vettri Kazhagam’s V.S. Babu, a 75-year-old veteran who once served as a Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam district secretary for north Chennai, later drifted to the All India Anna Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam, and joined actor Vijay’s party only in February this year.

The result brought back memories of Jyotiraditya Scindia losing the 2019 Lok Sabha election in Guna after the BJP fielded his former associate, Krishna Pal Singh Yadav, against him. Yadav was an Ayurvedic practitioner from Ashoknagar who had once worked as Scindia’s constituency representative before the two fell out over an Assembly ticket. The BJP had worked obsessively to defeat Scindia in the family stronghold; then politics produced one of its customary plot twists: by 2020, Scindia had himself joined the BJP, and in 2024 the party fielded him from Guna while quietly dropping Yadav.

Kolathur will linger in Stalin’s memory. He has represented the seat since 2011, when delimitation carved it out as a new constituency. Then again, Tamil Nadu has a habit of humbling its Chief Ministers. P.S. Kumarasamy Raja, M. Bhaktavatsalam, and Jayalalithaa all lost elections while serving as Chief Minister.

Even K. Kamaraj, perhaps the greatest Congress organiser India produced, lost Virudhunagar in 1967 to DMK student leader P. Seenivasan by 1,285 votes. Kamaraj was no longer Chief Minister then, but his defeat marked the collapse of Congress dominance in Tamil Nadu. One election turned the State into hostile territory for the party almost overnight.

The parallels end there. There was no SIR of electoral rolls in 1967. Reports suggest that Kolathur saw more than one lakh deletions in the draft electoral rolls published last December, among the highest in Chennai.

For Mamata, the Bhabanipur defeat carries extra sting. This is now the second consecutive Assembly election in which she has lost to BJP leader Suvendu Adhikari, once among her closest lieutenants in the Trinamool. She lost to him in Nandigram in 2021, the stage of the anti-land acquisition movement that helped Mamata build the Trinamool.

After leaving Bhabanipur to challenge Adhikari in Nandigram, she returned to Bhabanipur through a bypoll, winning by more than 58,000 votes. This time Adhikari followed her there and defeated her again, by 15,105 votes.

Trinamool Congress leaders point to the nearly 47,000 deletions in the constituency and the thousands of names kept “under adjudication”. So doubts and questions will persist. But a three-term Chief Minister lost her safest seat.

In Assam, Gaurav Gogoi lost Jorhat by 23,182 votes to BJP’s Hitendra Nath Goswami. Gogoi had led the Congress campaign and carried the aura of political inheritance in upper Assam as the son of former Chief Minister Tarun Gogoi. In the 2024 Lok Sabha election, he had defeated the BJP in the same broader region with a margin of over 1.44 lakh votes. This time, the Congress lost every Assembly segment in his parliamentary constituency.

Which brings us to a larger point. Opposition MLAs still won seats despite the SIR exercise and allegations of manipulation. But many of the opposition’s tallest figures lost. Either they failed to read the scale of the operation against them or the BJP played the game better or there was more. Politics has always borrowed from warfare: eliminate the leader, demoralise the ranks.

At the Battle of Hastings in October 1066, King Harold II’s death proved decisive. Once Harold fell, Anglo-Saxon resistance collapsed, and England changed hands in a single afternoon. Modern politics still carries traces of that instinct. Target the leader, break his aura. The rest often follows.

The BJP did precisely this with Rahul Gandhi in Amethi. I still remember travelling with Smriti Irani during the 2014 campaign. She addressed tiny gatherings with complete confidence even when barely 50 people turned up. Her victory looked improbable then. She lost that election, stayed rooted in the constituency, and returned in 2019 to defeat Gandhi in the Congress family stronghold. The BJP treated Amethi not merely as a constituency win but as a civilisational statement.

The pattern recurs across elections. In Tripura in 2018, the BJP framed the contest as Modi sarkar versus Manik Sarkar. In Delhi in 2013, Arvind Kejriwal challenged Chief Minister Sheila Dikshit directly in New Delhi constituency and defeated her; The Congress in Delhi never recovered. Kejriwal later tried the same logic against Narendra Modi in Varanasi in 2014, but that experiment ended differently. In Punjab in 2022, the AAP invested heavily in defeating former Chief Minister Amarinder Singh after he broke with the Congress. He lost badly, his party collapsed, and was eventually merged into the BJP.

Some leaders have learnt to protect themselves from this tactic. Uddhav Thackeray avoided Assembly contests altogether while serving as Chief Minister through the Legislative Council. Nitish Kumar did the same. It shields leaders from turning into constituency-specific targets around whom the entire opposition campaign can concentrate.

In school cricket matches, I recall how we would desperately try to get the opposing captain out first and then scream “captain out, captain out” loud enough for the entire neighbourhood to hear. The theory was uncomplicated: if the captain goes, panic follows. Years later, I discovered that the Australian cricket team had perfected this into a winning formula. If the rival captain bowled, their batters attacked him relentlessly. If he batted, bowlers were instructed to get him out early.

Write in and tell us about the BJP’s “Captain Out” strategy and what you think of it.

Until the next newsletter.

Anand Mishra, Political Editor, Frontline

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