On May 5, when M.K. Stalin resigned as Chief Minister of Tamil Nadu, the INDIA bloc’s strongest southern pillar, the Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam (DMK), was dramatically weakened. Stalin even lost from Kolathur constituency, which he had previously won for three consecutive terms. Similarly, not only did the Trinamool Congress lose in West Bengal, but Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee herself lost to the BJP leader Suvendu Adhikari in Bhabanipur, which had long been considered her unshakeable stronghold, underscoring the scale of the reversal.

Shocked by the defeat, the DMK has constituted a 36-member committee to conduct field studies on the results. “This committee will tour constituency-wise, directly meeting with district secretaries, candidates, constituency observers, office-bearers, and party workers to gather their opinions and recommendations, and submit the report to the party president by June 5,” the party said in a post on social media. The DMK has been hitting the streets on public issues. On May 16, it held a rally across Tamil Nadu as part of a State-wide agitation seeking abolition of the NEET examination for medical courses.

In West Bengal, the Trinamool Congress has set up a team to visit the families of party workers allegedly affected in post-election violence in Moyna, Tamluk, and Haldia, and assess the on-ground situation. The party has alleged grim intimidation of its workers and blamed Union Home Minister Amit Shah for what it described as targeted violence. Alleging “brutalities by the BJP”, Mamata’s nephew and party general secretary Abhishek Banerjee said: “Bengal has never learnt to surrender. The soil of this land has taught us to stand still in the face of oppression and never bow before fear tactics. We will endure every dark night, defeat every conspiracy, and rise stronger once again.” Bravado apart, such a resurgence will require a solid action plan.

The fall of two strong regional players from the INDIA coalition marks a decisive moment in regional and national political alignments and opens up new possibilities. It also poses serious challenges to opposition politics in the country, particularly to the INDIA coalition.

Senior Rashtriya Janata Dal (RJD) leader and Rajya Sabha MP Manoj Kumar Jha acknowledged the evident monopolisation of the political discourse by the BJP. However, he said: “Regional formations continue to hold deep social and cultural roots in their respective States, and therefore any obituary would be premature even though the BJP has consciously attempted to convert every election into a presidential-style contest.”

Jha believes that the recent Assembly elections underline both the resilience and vulnerability of regional parties and the Left. Jha, whose party is in alliance with the Congress in Bihar, told Frontline: “The Congress, despite its organisational limitations, remains the principal pan-India opposition party. Yet, writing off regional parties after one electoral cycle does not do justice to the wisdom and maturity of Indian voters. Regional and national parties cannot be viewed through simplistic binaries; they have a far more national vision and inclusive outlook than certain so-called national parties that thrive on parochialism. Therefore, 2026 should not be seen as signalling the decline of regional forces. Rather, it may deepen coalition-era politics in a country as socially and culturally diverse as India. The INDIA coalition’s future will depend less on arithmetic and more on political generosity, ideological clarity, and respect for regional aspirations.”

There is no denying that the Trinamool’s defeat undermines Mamata’s status as a national opposition leader and thus weakens the INDIA coalition. The strong consolidation of Hindu votes behind the BJP in West Bengal is a warning to the opposition that this trend can spread. Such a shift may affect opposition prospects in upcoming State elections, especially in Uttar Pradesh in 2027 and Karnataka in 2028, where parties opposed to the BJP depend on Muslim votes..

In States like Gujarat, Madhya Pradesh, Rajasthan, Chhattisgarh, and Uttarakhand, where the size of the minority population is minuscule, Hindu consolidation is not easy to achieve. In these States, the BJP has to rely on other strategies.

Just as Mamata’s party lost to the BJP in spite of a campaign invoking “Bengali asmita [pride]”, the collapse of Dravidian dominance in Tamil Nadu signals deep shifts in regional and national moods.

Emergence of the TVK and what it indicates

The emergence of the actor-turned-politician C. Joseph Vijay’s Tamilaga Vettri Kazhagam (TVK), as the largest party in the Tamil Nadu Assembly, could open up the State’s politics to new experiments in the future. It shows that traditional vote banks in the south can no longer be taken for granted and signals a fluid electorate’s appetite for new political options. The trend seems to echo the AAP’s surge in Delhi between 2013 and 2025.

The post-poll support that the TVK received from the Congress, the Viduthalai Chiruthaigal Katchi, the CPI, the CPI(M), the Indian Union Muslim League, and 25 rebel AIADMK MLAs demonstrates the readiness of parties to align with popular choices and their reluctance to oppose public sentiment.

The Congress leaving the DMK-led alliance signals willingness to form new alliances beyond the INDIA bloc and to recalibrate alliances to stay strong before the next Lok Sabha election. The TVK’s surprise win clearly has implications that go beyond Tamil Nadu. But the Congress move also risks deepening mistrust within the INDIA bloc.

This could lead to rethinking among other regional players in the INDIA coalition, and the Congress cannot afford to ignore them. In Uttar Pradesh, where the Congress has not been able to expand its own support base, it has been courting the Samajwadi Party (SP) and the Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP) simultaneously.

The Left, which was one of the key components of the first United Progressive Alliance (UPA) grouping, may also have to recalibrate its strategy after losing its last citadel, Kerala, to the Congress. Can a declining Left and a resurgent Congress in Kerala form a comfortable coalition at the Centre in 2029? It is the question on everybody’s mind.

Manish Tewari, former Information and Broadcasting Minister and Congress Lok Sabha MP from Chandigarh, had a word of caution about such extrapolations. “The 2029 parliamentary elections are still 37 months away. Already, analysts have started extrapolating the results of the 2026 Vidhan Sabha elections to a general election that is still in the future. A lesson that feverish talking heads and hair-splitting political pundits have repeatedly failed to internalise is that Assembly elections and parliamentary elections operate on parallel tracks: the twain do intersect, but seldom and sporadically,” Tewari told Frontline.

He recalled that the Congress, which in 2021 lost in Assembly elections in Kerala, West Bengal, Assam, and Puducherry, improved its Lok Sabha tally in 2024 significantly by anchoring the nascent INDIA bloc.

“The BJP came down from 303 seats in 2019 to 240 seats in 2024, a loss of 63 seats. After winning Rajasthan, Chhattisgarh, and Madhya Pradesh in November 2023, the BJP was on a high dose of adrenaline, eyeing 400 seats, but it had to eat humble pie. The Congress won Telangana in that round. In 2003, former Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee, after winning the same States, namely Rajasthan, Chhattisgarh, and Madhya Pradesh, decided to bring forward the Lok Sabha elections. The UPA ruled for 10 years after that. Nothing better demonstrates the disconnect between provincial and national elections,” the Congress MP said.

The Congress dilemma

The Congress has long faced a dilemma of balancing independent revival prospects with alliance commitments to regional parties. It will haunt the party again as it moves to address its organisational deficits in States such as West Bengal, Uttar Pradesh, and Tamil Nadu.

Regional parties, especially the Trinamool and the AAP, have been reluctant to accept Congress leadership. A section of the latter believes it must rebuild independently instead of relying on regional allies, especially as regional allies such as the SP, the BSP, and the DMK have been assertive. Mamata has frequently threatened to go it alone and has ignored INDIA coalition coordination meetings. The “go-it-alone” view within the Congress will now gain further momentum.

“The Congress has long faced a dilemma of balancing independent revival prospects with alliance commitments to regional partners.”

The Congress leadership welcomed the AAP’s rout in the Delhi Assembly election in 2025. This time, however, when similar celebrations broke out in the Congress over the Trinamool’s defeat in West Bengal, Rahul Gandhi issued a word of caution. The importance of the Trinamool, with its 40.8 per cent vote share in the recent Assembly election, cannot be discounted in the INDIA coalition’s larger calculations for the future.

But there is no denying the fact that a key weakness of the INDIA bloc has always been the tension between its constituents’ ambitions. Each regional party believed it could grow at the Congress’ expense while also working under the umbrella of opposition unity. The 2026 verdicts have changed that. The Trinamool and the DMK now face the same moment of introspection that the RJD, the SP, the AAP, and even the Biju Janata Dal faced after losing power.

INDIA bloc internal balance reshaped

This has undoubtedly reshaped the internal balance of the INDIA coalition and handed the Congress the leverage it had struggled to use to its advantage since the alliance was formed. Mamata, once a vocal critic of the Congress leadership, particularly Rahul Gandhi, has now signalled a willingness to prioritise coalition unity. This shift could help formulate another UPA-like arrangement under the Congress before 2029.

The Trinamool’s Deputy Leader in the Rajya Sabha, Sagarika Ghose, said: “The Bengal result makes it all the more important for the opposition INDIA to come together to prevent the capture of the State and our democracy by the BJP’s normless and lawless election machine. The 2029 general election will be fought on the question of whether the people of India believe in a plural multi-party democracy or in single-party majoritarianism, and this choice will shape the contest and the political alignments in the next three years.”

Ghose believes that the 2026 Assembly elections have shown that most of southern India remains a bridge that the BJP is unable to cross. She told Frontline that the Bengal verdict must be seen in the context of how the SIR exercise was rolled out and added that the Election Commission of India had failed to ensure a level playing field in the State.

For Rahul Gandhi, personally, the 2026 Assembly election results open a wider window, which had been shut to it since 2019, although it open a bit after the party’s 2024 Lok Sabha performance. It won 99 seats, a substantial rise from the 44 it won in 2014 and the 52 it won in 2019.

In particular, the mandate in Kerala, where the Congress-led United Democratic Front won a landslide victory, has given the Congress a lease of life and helped address some of the questions over Rahul Gandhi’s leadership. He had led the party’s campaign and anchored its connection with the electorate. Yet, the tug of war over the decision on who should be Chief Minister once again highlighted the weakening control of the central leadership over regional issues.

There are now bigger challenges before the Congress. The CPI(M) was once a critical factor in ensuring overall opposition credibility, but its allies now lack a territorial base. Regional forces have become weakened with the total decimation of the Left.

In this situation, the Congress faces the inevitability of carrying a greater burden on its shoulders. The BJP, on the other hand, is on a strong wicket. It has managed to install a BJP leader as Chief Minister in Bihar, dwarfing the big brother ally Janata Dal (United); it sent another regional stalwart, Naveen Patnaik, packing in Odisha in 2024; and now has West Bengal in its basket.

In Assam, the Congress which was the main opposition party, suffered a hat trick of losses. Even its chief ministerial face, Gaurav Gogoi, lost, and that too from the Jorhat seat, which is an Assembly segment of the Jorhat parliamentary seat that he represents in the Lok Sabha. The BJP not only retained power for a third consecutive term but also won a whopping 92 of 126 seats, for the first time winning a clear majority on its own in the State.

Congress’ greater burden of responsibility

The Congress is now perhaps the most formidable challenger from the opposition ranks to the BJP-led NDA. But it also faces the challenge of finding a foothold beyond the south. Three of the four States in which the Congress is in power—Karnataka, Telangana, and now Kerala—are in the south. Himachal Pradesh, where it is also in power, has just four Lok Sabha seats. The earlier sobriquet of the BJP as a party of the north is now mirrored by the Congress as the party of the south. It is not an encouraging scenario.

As the BJP’s geographical footprint expands across northern, western, and now eastern India with the long-coveted West Bengal, space for the Congress and the regional parties has visibly contracted, raising questions on their ability to cobble up a credible national alternative.

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