(this article is inspired [a politically correct word for stolen] from DK Singh’s piece in the Print)
Think back to the period from 1995 – 2004. This was the period when Naveen Patnaik, Mamata Bannerjee, Nitish Kumar (and even the Shiv Sena to an extent) used Vajpayee-Advani’s BJP to grow. Modi-Shah’s BJP are now claiming the return on those erstwhile inversments.
Biju Janata Dal – In 1997, Naveen Patnaik was best known as a Delhi-based socialite – famous among the media & the Lutyens folk for his love for his Dunhill cigarettes and Famous Grouse whisky. When his father, Biju Patnaik, passed away in 1997, Naveen struck an alliance with the then BJP leaders in Vajpayee and Pramod Mahajan to deal with his late father’s wily colleagues in the Janata Dal (BJP had little to no presence in Odisha). Together they prevented any appropriation of Biju Patnaik’s legacy by anyone else and formed the BJD with Naveen Patnaik gaining full control of his father’s legacy and of Odisha. Both sides benefited then as BJP got its first MP (7 of them actually) from Odisha in the 1998 Lok Sabha elections. Then the BJD-BJP duo brought down the Congress government in 1999, with the BJP as a junior partner. By 2009, Patnaik had become a seasoned politician and seeing BJP’s widening footprint as a threat, he broke ties with the party ahead of the 2009 elections, leaving it weak for the next decade.
Today, the BJD is a pale shadow of itself with the BJP in full control of Odisha – both in the Lok Sabha and state assembly. Some of the BJD’s tallest leaders (Jay Panda, etc) are in the BJP.
Trinamool Congress – Mamata Banerjee split from the Indian National Congress in 1997 because she believed the party was incapable of aggressively opposing the Left Front in West Bengal. Following a period of growing isolation and clashes with the state leadership, she was officially expelled from the Congress in December 1997. Mamata then joined hands with the BJP in the 1998 Lok Sabha elections – as a win-win for both. Banerjee’s newly floated AITC ended up with seven Lok Sabha seats. Further, the Vajpayee-Advani BJP was desperately seeking to end its political untouchability, which it achieved through this alliance and got a bonus by winning its first-ever MP from Bengal (Tapan Sikdar from Dum Dum). The BJP’s tally went up to two in the 1999 Lok Sabha elections and they got their first MLA in Bengal (in a bypoll – Badal Bhattacharya from Ashoknagar). Cut to 2001, where the AITC having become very powerful and believing that the BJP would be unable to help her win Bengal vs the Left, Bannerjee left the NDA in 2001 over the Tehelka expose and went with the Congress in the Assembly elections that year. They did not win. So Mamata returned to the NDA ahead of the 2004 Lok Sabha elections, only to leave it again after the 2006 Assembly elections.
For Mamata, the BJP’s political utility in her fight against the Left was over. However, what she did end up doing was rekindling the political legitimacy that Shyama Prasad Mookerjee’s BJP once had as a political force in West Bengal.
Today, BJP has complete dominance in Bengal in the assembly and the Lok Sabha, through elections and defections. AITC has less than 10 MPs and less than 30 MLAs. And we see Mamata trying to cozy back with the Congress in order to borrow some political clout. The Chief Minister is a former AITC leader.
Janata Dal United – In 1994, when Nitish Kumar fell out with Lalu Yadav and formed the Samata Party in 1994, he was no mass leader. With George Fernandes. When they entered into an alliance with the BJP in the 1996 general elections, as Vajpayee-Advani’s party was a bigger force. This association gave time and political exygen to enable Nitish to grow into a political force in Bihar and become the bigger brother in the alliance. He then continued to use the BJP at his whim and political convenience, even to a point where he cancelled a dinner in Patna to snub Narendra Modi in 2010. 4 flip-flops where Nitish came & went away from the BJP between 2010 and 2024.
Today, the BJP has full control over Bihar. It has its own CM, a bunch of MPs and MLAs and all of JDU’s leaders are pro-BJP where there isn’t even a whiff of them looking for options. Hence, despite the numbers being almost equal, the relatively JDU seems is beholden to the BJP for political relevance, both at the centre and the state.
What’s common between these 3 is that they used the Vajpayee-Advani’s BJP to grow into serious politicians. The BJP used them to shed its political untouchability and expand its footprint in different states. And, given that the relationship was transactional given the flip flops, the BJP using these parties to grow and eventually surpass them is basically the mirror image of what they did with the BJP in the past – to be used and dumped at will.
It is also interesting to note that at some point in the past 30 years, BJP has had its most aggressive political campaigns against these leaders.
Shiv Sena – Bal Thackeray had fielded two Shiv Sena leaders on the BJP’s symbol in the 1984 elections as a precursor (testing waters / evaluating BJP’s political legitimacy in Maharastra) to their formal alliance in subsequent elections. All the way from 1995 through 2019, they stuck together with the BJP growing in political heft in Maharashtra where, at one point, the Sena became a junior partner to the BJP. When, in 2019, in an enormous display of political myopia, Uddhav Thackeray parted ways with the BJP and partnered with the parties that the erstwhile duo (BJP-Sena) used to vitriolically battle for nearly 3 decades, he started walking down the path which ended with the Thackerays losing the Shiv Sena and the BJP running the show.
Today, the BJP runs Maharashtra at the state level and though the Shiv Sena (minus the Thackerays) has 50% more MPs in Maharashtra than the BJP, but they are seen as basically the BJP in another name, not the erstwhile Shiv Sena, which was the senior partner to the BJP.
There was a time when regional parties found in the BJP a convenient ally in their fight against then-dominant Congress (or the Left in Bengal). What has happened to Banerjee, Patnaik, Kumar, Thackeray and many others today is that they didn’t factor in that the debt comes due. Modi-Shah’s BJP is different from Vajpayee-Advani and they are here to collect.
P.S. the Assam story is even more intriguing. In 2020, the BJP’s coalition partner in the state, the Bodoland People’s Front (BPF), emerged as the single largest party in the Bodoland Territorial Council (BTC) election. The BJP however, partnered with the United People’s Party Liberal (UPPL), the second largest, to form the government in the Bodoland Territorial Region (BTR). A miffed BPF then went with the Congress-led Opposition alliance in the 2021 Assembly elections, but ended up on the Opposition benches.
In September 2025, the BPF swept the BTC election, defeating the BJP-UPPL alliance. So, the Assam chief minister Himanta Biswa Sarma brought the BPF back into the Assam government. In the 2026 Assembly elections, the BJP left the UPPL high and dry, giving 11 seats to the BPF and itself contesting four other seats in the BTR. The UPPL had to contest on its own and ended up with zero seats. Essentially, between the BPF and the UPPL, whichever regional party wins, the BJP brings them into its fold at the state level.