Welcome to Foreign Policy’s South Asia Brief.
The highlights this week: India’s ruling Bharatiya Janata Party improves its position after significant state elections, Bangladesh closely watches the results in neighboring West Bengal, and India and Pakistan tensions remain high a year after their military conflict.
West Bengal’s Saffron Wave
On Monday, votes were counted in five Indian states that held elections last week, and the results delivered a boost to the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP). In Kerala, the opposition Indian National Congress defeated a coalition of leftist parties. But the BJP significantly benefited from the outcomes everywhere else.
In Assam, the ruling party maintained its hold on power in the state legislature, and it also triumphed in the union territory of Puducherry. In Tamil Nadu, a long-standing BJP rival—the regional Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam party—was stunned by a new party, Tamilaga Vettri Kazhagam. Led by an actor-turned-politician, the new party campaigned on an anti-corruption platform.
The most significant result came in India’s fourth-most populous state, West Bengal, where the BJP won in a landslide over the incumbent All India Trinamool Congress (AITC) party. In doing so, it unseated its leader, Mamata Banerjee, one of Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s most formidable rivals.
Banerjee has been chief minister of West Bengal for 15 years, three years longer than Modi has been premier. The BJP’s triumph is striking, given that voter turnout was estimated at a record high of nearly 93 percent. The BJP hasn’t ruled West Bengal at any time in the party’s 46-year history, and now it has a massive mandate to lead the government.
The BJP’s victory in West Bengal, which saw the party take 207 of 294 seats, can be attributed to a range of factors, from economic distress to anti-incumbency sentiment. Opponents of the ruling party also point to a more controversial factor: the Indian Election Commission’s decision to remove 9 million voters from the state’s voter rolls, or nearly 12 percent of the electorate.
Data shows that many of those removed are Muslims, who make up a core AITC constituency. Though New Delhi holds that the commission’s move is part of a nationwide effort to weed out ineligible voters, critics say that it is a BJP tactic to strengthen its electoral prospects.
With these results, the BJP is in a much better place than it was two years ago, when it won a third straight term in national elections—but with a smaller majority than ever before. Since June 2024, Modi has governed in a coalition for the first time. This emboldened the opposition alliance, and Congress leader Rahul Gandhi formally took up the role of opposition leader.
At the national level, government critics hoped that this opposition momentum could combine with rising anti-incumbency against the BJP—including voter unease about its Hindu nationalist agenda—and make the party vulnerable in the 2029 election.
But gradually, the BJP has righted the ship. It won a handful of state elections in 2024 and 2025, paving the way for its performance in last week’s contests. The BJP has benefited as much from its wins as from its rivals’ losses. After all, West Bengal’s AITC and Tamil Nadu’s Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam are two of the major parties in the national opposition alliance.
Now, that alliance is floundering, and the opposition will face familiar criticism: that it is unable to capitalize on the BJP’s vulnerabilities.
The ruling party has suffered a few blows over the years: mass protests against controversial farm reforms and the Citizenship Amendment Act, a botched response to the COVID-19 pandemic, and persistent unemployment issues, to name a few. But this week, the BJP reasserted its status as a political juggernaut, and party leaders are brimming with confidence.
It’s a long way to 2029, but barring a major shift, the BJP and Modi will be favored to win a fourth straight term—something that hasn’t been achieved in India’s postcolonial history.
What We’re Following
Bangladesh and West Bengal. Bangladesh, which borders West Bengal, watched the election results closely. Even in the best of times, cross-border issues have complicated India-Bangladesh ties. A BJP government in West Bengal will likely take a harder line than the AITC: For example, BJP leaders have accused Banerjee of enabling illegal immigration from Bangladesh.
New leadership in West Bengal could also harm efforts on the part of the Bangladesh National Party government in Dhaka to patch up ties with New Delhi. The bilateral relationship has been rocky since the 2024 ouster of Bangladeshi Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina, who fled to India, where she remains.
Bangladesh has good reasons to try to ease tensions with India: Its struggling economy would benefit, and border security is easier to manage if ties are friendlier. But if a BJP government in West Bengal implements hard-line policies, it could add to the already prevalent anti-India sentiment among the Bangladeshi public.
One year since India-Pakistan conflict. This week marks one year since India and Pakistan fought in a four-day conflict—the most serious between the two bitter rivals since 1971. New Delhi began the conflict in retaliation for a terrorist attack in Indian-administered Kashmir that killed 26 civilians, most of them Hindu tourists. Pakistan denies involvement in the attack.
The military conflict plunged relations, relatively stable since 2021, to their lowest level in decades. They are still frozen today, largely because of the intensity of the hostilities and punitive measures taken by India: cutting off all trade, closing the border, and suspending the Indus Waters Treaty, a rare lasting success story of India-Pakistan cooperation.
Another conflict can’t be ruled out, not only because tensions remain very high, but also because India and Pakistan seem to have learned unsettling lessons—including that they can comfortably use conventional military force against one another under the nuclear umbrella.
Gor visits Nepal. U.S. Ambassador to India Sergio Gor, who also serves as special envoy to South and Central Asia, wrapped up a that-day visit to Kathmandu, Nepal, on Saturday. According to a U.S. readout, Gor’s meetings focused on expanding commercial ties, including U.S. business opportunities in Nepal’s technology sector.
Gor met with Nepal’s foreign minister, finance minister, and the chair of the ruling Rastriya Swatantra Party, which took power in March. He didn’t speak with Nepali Prime Minister Balen Shah, despite asking for a meeting—a request supported by some officials within the Nepali Foreign Ministry. The prime minister’s office said Shah was unavailable because he was prioritizing domestic issues.
This nonmeeting was not a surprise, given previous reporting in the Kathmandu Post that Shah will only meet with visiting foreign dignitaries of similar or equal rank to himself. Apparently, Gor’s considerable influence in Washington—he is a close confidant of U.S. President Donald Trump—wasn’t enough to sway Shah.
Under the Radar
On April 21, pirates seized an oil tanker off the coast of Somalia. Of the 17 crew members, at least 10 are reportedly Pakistani nationals. Conditions on the ship are deteriorating, according to Ansar Burney Trust International, a Pakistani human rights group that said this week that it had established contact with the hijackers, who demanded a $7 million ransom.
Perhaps because of the delicate nature of the crisis, Islamabad has said little publicly aside from noting that it is in touch with Somalia’s government and believes that the Pakistani captives are safe.
This has not reassured their families, though: Pakistani media outlets have reported extensively on family members of those on the ship, some of whom say they have received little information from the government about their loved ones. Their worries have increased since a video emerged from the ship last week showing about a dozen men in a cramped space.
Last week, Nehal Hashmi, the governor of Pakistan’s Sindh province, said that authorities were working hard to free the Pakistani crew members. Many of them are believed to be from Karachi, the provincial capital of Sindh.
FP’s Most Read This Week
Regional Voices
In the Daily Star, economist Fahmida Khatun argues that Bangladesh’s energy policies have failed to boost growth. The country “needs to reduce its reliance on imported fuels and accelerate its shift towards locally generated renewable energy to safeguard economic stability, enhance resilience to global disruptions, and ensure a sustainable, self-reliant development path for the future,” she writes.
In the Express Tribune, development specialist Syed Khizar Ali Shah discusses Pakistan’s long-standing dependence on external assistance. “The real question is not how much aid Pakistan can secure, but whether it can eventually outgrow the need for it,” he argues. “The lessons of economic history are unequivocal: Prosperity cannot be imported.”
A Kuensel editorial warns that Bhutan’s government must accord more urgency to the country’s rapidly falling birth rate, which has dropped by nearly 63 percent in 35 years: “If the government recognises this as a national crisis, then the response must match the scale of the challenge. What we need is not a flurry of incentives, but a comprehensive, family-centred policy framework.”
