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The legislative elections in five states of India – Rajasthan, Madhya Pradesh, Chhattisgarh, Telangana and Mizoram – are the last set of polls before the general election scheduled for April 2024. While the results of the general election do not always match the state elections, their outcome will nevertheless have a psychological impact on Indian political parties and Indian voters.

These elections will also help the parties finalise their agendas for 2024 by fine-tuning which issues work or don’t work with voters. Since the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) has projected Prime Minister Narendra Modi over the local leaders from the election-going states, political observers will keenly watch whether his electoral magic – a mix of demagoguery and ideological rhetoric – is still effective.

That it has a government ruling at the Centre is an advantage for the BJP, whose campaign centres around its unapologetic Hindu nationalism, plus its welfare schemes and ‘freebies’. All of these – the free food distribution scheme for the poor, the subsidised cooking gas cylinders, the cash doles to women and the poor – are presented as Modi’s personal largesse.

The Congress party’s campaign promises a caste census, which would guide the distribution of entitlements in proportion to a caste’s size in the population. The party also offers competitive freebies as ‘guarantees’ similar to the BJP, as well as farm loan waivers and unemployment dole for youth.

The promise of returning to the Old Pension Scheme (OPS) is also a key campaign plank of the Congress. The OPS guaranteed half the last basic salary drawn as pension for government employees, unlike the entirely employee-financed and purely voluntary New Pension Scheme, which was introduced by a BJP government at the Centre in 2003.

These populist welfare measures are bound to affect the already precarious finances of the election-going states, irrespective of which party comes to power. They will also have a knock-on effect on the finances of the Central government. However, none of the political parties seem concerned by this reality.

The state elections have been highly centralised for the BJP, with Modi and his Home Minister Amit Shah having the final say on candidate selection to the campaign agenda in each state. The BJP’s relegation of state leaders to the background is seen by many as an unnecessary risk – should the party lose in these states, Modi will have to take the blame. Victory, no doubt, will go only to Modi’s account.

Just as the state elections can prove a turning point for the BJP, they are also an acid test for the leadership of Rahul Gandhi, the scion of the Gandhi dynasty that rules the Congress party. His image and his political vision seem to have gained considerably from his 146-day, 4,080km ‘walkathon’ across the country.

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The Indian state of West Bengal is heading into a high-stakes assembly election that must be held before the current legislative term ends on May 7, 2026, with all 294 seats up for grabs. In an intensely polarized contest where the ruling Trinamool Congress (TMC) and the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) remain the principal rivals, cross-border developments are serving as political ammunition. Against this backdrop, Bangladesh’s February 2026 election has quickly evolved from a foreign news event into a charged talking point within West Bengal. 

West Bengal shares a long, densely populated frontier with Bangladesh, where kinship, language, and everyday mobility blur national boundaries. In this setting, citizenship debates, already politicized through rhetoric surrounding the National Register of Citizens (NRC), can quickly turn Bengali-speaking Muslims into default suspects. With that in mind, Bangladesh’s election is increasingly being framed not as external politics, but as a domestic security concern.

Within days of the results, a familiar image dominated social media and mainstream television alike: maps of Bangladesh highlighting Jamaat-e-Islami’s victories in constituencies bordering West Bengal, accompanied by sweeping claims that “radicalization” is spreading and that the “border is at risk.” 

Some of the most forceful narratives have emerged from West Bengal’s own political arena. BJP messaging has invoked Bangladesh’s electoral outcome to reinforce its long-standing claims about “infiltration” from across the border. At the most extreme end of this discourse are assertions that such migration could alter West Bengal’s demographic balance and, by extension, influence the outcome of the upcoming assembly election.