Five states, three new governments, and one question nobody has answered

When results were counted on May 4, the headline was a breach. The BJP crossed from a distant third to governing party in West Bengal for the first time in the state's history, and Tamil Nadu produced a government in which a political formation barely two years old holds the balance of power. Neither outcome surprised people who had been counting booth-level swings rather than opinion polls.

The genuinely novel fact was elsewhere. Congress won Kerala while its INDIA bloc partners lost ground in West Bengal and Tamil Nadu. The alliance assembled to defeat the BJP in 2024 has now shown that its parts do not travel well without each other, and that a national umbrella is not a substitute for a state organisation.

Three governments, no settled majority

The question of chief ministers in Kerala, West Bengal, Tamil Nadu, Assam and Puducherry took more than a day to resolve, which is itself the finding. In Tamil Nadu the contest was not merely between parties but over who could assemble a floor, and by May 9 that had become concrete enough for the AMMK chief T V V Dhinakaran to ask the Governor to invite the AIADMK to form a government, alleging horse-trading. In Kerala, Congress was still publicly undecided on its choice on May 10.

• West Bengal: the BJP governing the state for the first time, after a campaign fought largely on electoral rolls and citizenship.
• Tamil Nadu: a young formation in government, with analysts describing the DMK as flexible and the Opposition unusually weak.
• Kerala: a Congress win its own bloc partners did not match, with the chief ministerial decision outstanding a week after the count.

What makes this cycle unusual is not instability as such. Indian state governments have been unstable before. It is that the sources of instability have moved: from defections inside one party to arithmetic that spans parties, regions and, in one telling case, a candidate's film career.