A surprise defeat in one of India’s biggest states shows that Modi is not invincible | Amit Chaudhuri

Amid the calamitous second Covid wave, the ruling BJP party tried and failed to win the coveted West Bengal elections

In the months leading up to the assembly elections in West Bengal, I began to realise that there was every chance that the state where I live, once a left stronghold, would soon be under the rule of the Bharatiya Janata party (BJP). The realisation came from talking to ordinary, working-class Bengalis. K, a man in his late 30s who had come to work for us, said tersely but firmly that he'd be voting BJP. The reason? You need to throw out parties in power from time to time. It's good for them." He was invoking the Kerala model - in Kerala, voters periodically alternate between putting one of the two main parties in power. Electorates in all states - in fact, the whole country - would probably go Kerala's way if they had a viable opposition to turn to.

From K, I learned firsthand what I knew in theory: that the term anti-incumbency" doesn't capture the ground-level resentment people begin to feel towards parties that have been in power for too long. The resentment in a state like Bengal isn't aimed so much at the party's principal figureheads; it's a reaction against the intolerable nature of a politics of local patronage and fiefdoms. Everywhere you go in West Bengal, you're in a terrain where every inch - footpath, tea stall, shop, roadside club" (that key political, social and sporting institution), festive celebration - is politicised. The ruling dispensation manifests itself through all-powerful, low-level functionaries who govern through bullying. K and others I spoke to thought it was time to teach these people a lesson. For them, a vote for the leading Hindu nationalist party wasn't about temples and Islam.