There are, however, two political moments when such a transition is easier to engineer. The first is when the party’s leadership is strong, its vote-winning ability is overwhelming, and there are enough benefits to distribute to a larger pool. Success in this case gives space to adapt and breeds more success. The second is when the party is in the middle of such an existential crisis that it has nothing to lose when it undertakes such experiments. The prospect of failure gives room for autonomous and previously unthinkable actions.

In Indian politics, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) is in the first camp and has displayed remarkable political creativity in leveraging its moment of success. The Congress is in the second camp and has failed to make the necessary adjustments; each year in the past decade has been worse for the Congress than the preceding year, yet it fails to change.

Take the BJP’s actions in Madhya Pradesh, Rajasthan and Chhattisgarh this past week. The BJP defied expectations and won all three states with a comfortable majority despite not naming CM candidates in any of them. Narendra Modi’s connect with voters; smart social engineering at the macro and micro levels; Amit Shah’s organisational machine; the ability to leverage the Opposition’s narrative inconsistency; the story of nationalism, welfare, and Hindutva; and a clear resource advantage saw it win the support of a wide coalition of groups.

Modi and Shah had been waiting for this moment for ten years. Their discomfort with the entrenched leaders of these states — Vasundhara Raje, Shivraj Singh Chouhan and Raman Singh — was clear, even though this discomfort existed in varying degrees. The 2013 round of polls was before their arrival on the national stage; 2018 saw a defeat in all three states but it wasn’t a rout, and replacing the leadership outright was hard, especially in MP where the party returned to power under Chouhan and Rajasthan where Raje couldn’t be ignored. But now that they had made the BJP the first political choice of a plurality of Dalits, OBCs, tribals, upper castes and women in these states, the Modi-Shah duo had the opportunity to effect a change they had been waiting for since 2014.

And so, they did, but with an eye on both preparing the ground for the future and expanding the Hindu social coalition.

In MP, the selection of a Yadav chief minister is sheer genius. The BJP cannot pick a Yadav leader in Bihar and UP, despite the sub-caste being the dominant OBC group, because the party’s political success is built on a non-Yadav coalition that is reminded of Yadav excesses come each election. But Yadavs remain an influential bloc across the heartland. The BJP is sending a signal to Yadavs across four states, MP, UP, Bihar and Haryana, that the party has space for them and respects their aspirations; this is particularly important in the context of the Opposition’s demand for a caste census. It is also expanding the pool of OBC support within MP itself. At the same time, the selection of a Brahmin and Dalit deputy CM and a Thakur speaker is a signal to communities across the state that they will find representation in the BJP’s wider coalition.

The selection of a tribal CM in Chhattisgarh, after having picked a tribal woman as President, is yet another sign of political creativity in a state where 30% of the population is tribal and tribal consolidation helped the BJP win, even as the Congress picked the wrong state to do its narrow OBC politics based on a Kurmi leader. It also sends a signal to tribals across MP, Odisha, Jharkhand, Maharashtra and Gujarat that the BJP is their party. In addition, the selection of a Sahu deputy CM sends a signal to the most dominant OBC sub-caste in the state, while the selection of a Brahmin deputy CM indicates that upper castes will remain represented in the top echelons.

In Rajasthan, the BJP escaped the intricate and multi-layered rivalries that permeate the Rajput-Jat-Gujjar-Meena axis and instead opted for a Brahmin CM, where the caste group, due to sheer demographics, is seen as relatively non-threatening. At a time when Brahmins complain that the BJP is becoming a Thakur party, largely due to the meteoric rise of Yogi Adityanath, this was a signal to the upper caste constituency across the heartland that even as it does its social engineering, the BJP is acutely conscious of maintaining a balance between its upper caste segments. The inclusion of a Rajput and Dalit deputy CM once again was a powerful signal to communities at two ends of the power spectrum.

All three new CMs come from the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh stable, a sign that the BJP now has a pool of candidates embedded in its parivar from social constituencies that aren’t its traditional source of support. Usually, going outside one’s base requires a degree of ideological compromise. But the organisational hard work and recruitment in the past few decades, springing from the Ram Janmabhoomi agitation, and the consolidation of the Hindu political coalition in more recent years means that the party has leaders outside its traditional pool and doesn’t have to make this ideological compromise. This also illustrates the deepening penetration of Hindutva across society.

Add to the social and ideological mix the generational and personnel factors. Chouhan, Raje and Singh aren’t particularly old, but since they have been in dominant positions in public life for close to two decades, the newer leaders, in public perception, represent a shift in generation. This has happened with the three older leaders, at least publicly, playing along with the national leadership’s choices even if they are privately unhappy. The fact that all three realise that challenging Modi’s word will have political consequences and end whatever prospects they may still have in the party is a clear factor in this acquiescence.

Now take the Congress. It wasn’t able to effect a personnel and generational shift when it had the chance to do so in Rajasthan and MP (in 2018). Doing so would have alienated the older leaders, a price that the party wasn’t strong enough to risk or willing to pay. Despite its political rhetoric in favour of the marginalised communities, it wasn’t able to expand its social coalition in these three states. With successive electoral defeats, the patronage benefits it has in its arsenal to distribute to leaders are continuously shrinking. And the national leadership doesn’t seem to have the imagination or strength to use failure to reset the party’s orientation.

The BJP’s real victory was not just on December 3 with the poll results. Its real victory is in managing these complex transitions without any significant or visible political collateral damage. And in that mix of political decision-making and execution abilities lies the secret of the BJP’s political dominance.