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Bankipur, a constituency in the legislature of the state of Bihar, had been held by the BJP for three decades. But the fledgling Jan Suraaj Party, led by political strategist-turned-politician Prashant Kishor, ended that reign, winning a seat that the BJP’s national president, Nitin Nabin, had held until just a few months earlier.
Nabin, the BJP chief, had spent the Bankipur campaign denouncing the country’s Gen Z protesters as “a virus and a cockroach gang devoted to breaking the country”.
Instead, it was the BJP’s stranglehold over the constituency that was broken. That surprise electoral verdict has thrust upon India a broader question, say analysts: Will India’s most formidable political machine — the BJP — be forced to change.
A charm offensive, gone slightly wrong.
In Uttar Pradesh, India’s most populous state, the party has launched a Gen Z outreach initiative directing civil administrative officers into schools for career counselling sessions.
After another video of Modi that briefly vanished from Facebook, the parliamentary committee on information technology demanded an apology from Meta chief executive Mark Zuckerberg.
New Delhi-based analyst Asim Ali says this sudden scramble for social media relevance reveals a lot about the party itself.
Gilles Verniers, a researcher at the Center for International Studies (CERI) at Sciences Po in Paris, described the BJP’s outreach as “a battle for perception” rather than a policy shift.
Verniers argued that what was genuinely broken is the BJP’s usual playbook against dissent: branding protesters antinational, foreign-funded or terrorists, as they did during demonstrations against the controversial Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA) in 2019-20.
The changed citizenship law, for the first time, introduced a religious test for naturalised citizenship: non-Muslim asylum seekers from India’s neighbouring nations were given a faster track to citizenship.
That past approach towards protests failed this time partly because the movement mocked itself before the state could, and partly because it was pluralistic.
Unlike the anti-CAA or farmers’ protests, it could not be pinned to one religion or community, and also drew in young people from the BJP’s own so-called “upper-caste” Hindu base.
It was a “truly caste-blind movement”, Verniers said.
The episode also punctured a notion pushed by the BJP, he said, that Modi held a natural command over the youth.
For the first time, the prime minister “appears his age”, Verniers said of 75-year-old Modi.
Does any of this show up in the numbers.
The BJP lost two of the three by-elections held in the first week of August, in states it governs – Bankipur in Bihar and Datia in Madhya Pradesh. However, it comfortably retained the third, Manjalpur in Gujarat, Modi’s home state.
Opposition leaders drew a straight line from the losses to the student protests, but analysts were more cautious. Ali warned against reading too much into the Bankipur vote.
By-elections, Verniers added, are decided by a fraction of the electorate, “barely a third of the population vote”, and that the BJP’s system of power “has proved very resilient to absorbing setbacks”.
Verniers points to Haryana, where the BJP won a majority a few years after the northern state’s farmers joined a yearlong movement to oppose three controversial agricultural laws.
It was an election fought “not on farmers, but on caste”, he said.
What had shifted was not the vote count but a surrounding story now building “into a broader narrative of challenges to the BJP”.
Few politicians visited Jantar Mantar, the epicentre of the Gen Z protests in New Delhi, as often as Pushpendra Saroj, 27, a Samajwadi Party member of parliament from Kaushambi in Uttar Pradesh.
The Samajwadi Party is the main opposition to the BJP in Uttar Pradesh, India’s most populous state.
Saroj watched a gathering of a few hundred swell into thousands after activist Sonam Wangchuk was hospitalised following a 20-day hunger strike. He credited this to “the aggression from the government” – weeks of silence, alleged cuts to power and water and the July 20 baton charge against protesters in New Delhi.
The crowd had grown beyond its student base to include army veterans and even serving police officers.
The politician pointed out that the education minister’s resignation came only after “fingers got pointed at the prime minister directly”.
A simpler sympathy helped, too. “Nobody likes to see children getting beaten up,” Saroj said.
?This is not a victory in any terms’.
Anjali was also critical of who paid the price once the protests ended. Muslim and Dalit students, she said, were “the first to be put behind bars”, the first to face intimidation and police complaints, echoing the 2019 raid on Jamia Millia Islamia, the New Delhi university at the heart of the anti-CAA protests.
In the western state of Goa, police detained two young men for allegedly backing jailed activists Umar Khalid and Sharjeel Imam while celebrating Pradhan’s exit, an episode she reads as part of the same pattern.
What comes next for the CJP movement.
Ali, Verniers and Anjali all agree that a leap into electoral politics is unlikely for the CJP.
Verniers called that restraint from the group so far “tactically smart”, citing the example of the Aam Aadmi Party (AAP), a protest movement that built a successful party but, a decade into power, is “seen as a disappointment” and “on the verge of disappearance” in some former strongholds.
A national campaign demands money, volunteers and organisation that a young, often underemployed movement lacks. Its more durable influence, Verniers suggested, will be on other parties’ agendas, “as an interest group, rather than as a separate political force”, one the opposition has been unusually willing to embrace.
Anjali described AISA’s posture in similar terms: present at Jantar Mantar, but unwilling to let the fight narrow to one resignation. The group, she said, plans to keep building the argument against the government on campuses nationwide.
Al Jazeera reached out to 18 BJP national spokespeople for their responses to this article, but did not receive any replies.
The gap between power and legitimacy.
Ali said he did not expect the BJP to trade its Hindu majoritarian politics — an ideology known as Hindutva — for one built on jobs and education, as demanded by CJP-led Gen Z protesters.
That may be, but what has changed, Verniers suggested, is not so much the BJP’s raw political power as its legitimacy.
But the authority behind that dominance is what the protests have dented. And that gulf “between the actual power that the BJP has, and its ability to have citizens comply and obey” is harder to repair with a by-election win or a polished reel, he said.
That gap, Verniers said, “is the really important, interesting disconnect” the party now has to live with.
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Informação baseada em material público de Al Jazeera, reescrito pela redação ULTRA NOTÍCIAS.
