Three weeks since the results, the dust of assembly elections has all but settled, and though the result in West Bengal was a rupture, a political sameness is again descending. The stillness is broken erratically — now, by the victor extending its strong arm to swat down the impudent Cockroach Janta Party, and then, by rumblings within the vanquished party. But in general, both seem headed back to square one, BJP as well as TMC.

The BJP dare not pause too long on the CJP phenomenon, because that might mean wondering if, like the irrepressible cockroach, dissent finds a way — even in the guise of a reclaimed slur, even in the aftermath of a famous victory. It might mean acknowledging that the people speak, and need to be heard, not just when they cast their vote every five years, but also in between. On the other side, if the TMC stops to listen to the voices within that are raising questions about its own complicities in its defeat, it might have to recognise that the onus of political correction, and action, is on it.

This avoidance of the political imperative is also framed in readings of the West Bengal verdict. Especially in the non-BJP camp, whose future depends on finding the way forward from Bengal, they sound like an abdication of responsibility.

The election was won, and lost, it is being said, because of “SIR”, or “Hindu consolidation” or “anti-incumbency”. All three have truth in them. All three are framed as political dead-ends.

First, the SIR. The Special Intensive Revision of electoral rolls cast a long shadow over the Bengal election, with about 27 lakh voters in the “under adjudication” category deleted controversially, and not given time to appeal. Going by the scoreboard, the deletions did not impact the result significantly — the deletions are larger than the margin of victory in 49 seats, of which only 26 figure in the BJP’s list of 206. But numbers alone do not tell the full SIR story.

The SIR residue lingers on in disturbing questions about the un-level playing field, the questionable role of the umpire, the Election Commission, and of the Supreme Court. It is there in the dispiriting message to vulnerable voters, especially of the Muslim minority. Going forward, therefore, whether or not the SIR helped the BJP swing the Bengal election, is not the main SIR question.

As the exercise unfolds in other states, apprehensions touched off by the Bengal SIR must be addressed diligently. The Opposition’s apocalyptic pitch on the “stolen election”, however, which frames its own search for a villain and fall guy, comes in the way of a patient politics of vigilance and monitoring.

The second explanation for the verdict – anti-incumbency — has long been sanitised of people’s real concerns, and emptied of political meaning. It is invoked by outgoing incumbents as an unstoppable force, as if it could not have been countered by good governance or politics. It suits an incoming government, too, to treat anti-incumbency as a black box, not as a set of discontents that now need to be addressed by it.

The refusal to look anti-incumbency in the eye is even more evident in West Bengal, where by questioning the verdict’s legitimacy, the TMC avoids a confrontation with ground-level reasons for the erosion of its popularity. Like the oppressive shadow network it inherited from the party-society under Left rule, for instance, and made its own. TMC cadres and political-entrepreneurs became the state, insinuating themselves in all spaces, extracting and extorting. They dissolved the boundaries between party and government, blurred lines of accountability.

After Bengal, the TMC and national Opposition have resorted to another increasingly visible strategy of avoiding the political responsibility that flows from the electoral verdict. They point, helplessly, to a Hindu consolidation that is now cast as an iron law of political nature, much like anti-incumbency.

On this third explanation, there is an active convergence of BJP and non-BJP — it suits the BJP that its opponents see Hindu consolidation as the trumping electoral argument and logic. The Suvendu Adhikari government’s first flurry of decisions — from banning namaz on streets to imposing Vande Mataram in madrasas — underlines this. The new government is triumphantly owning the space the BJP has worked to expand and that its opponents have ceded to it. This also helps it to defer for now, or indefinitely, its pressing governance challenges.

The Opposition needs to ask if it undermines itself by treating Hindu consolidation like anti-incumbency — as something without a political counter, as almost the end of politics.

In fact, a big question after Bengal could be this: In the era of BJP dominance, what does the politics of secularism mean? At a time when the distortions of secularism-in-practice have made it easy for the BJP to fling the label of “appeasement politics” at its opponents, and when the label sticks, how can secularism-as-principle be recast or retrieved? If the pessimistic logic of a permanent majority and minority in a diverse democracy is not to win, the search for answers must pick up speed.

The communal question has a long and troubled past, there are no ready answers in it.

Before Independence, it was hoped that solidarities forged in the anti-colonial movement would blunt and eventually dissolve religious antagonisms in the new country, and the people would be addressed by their leaders irrespective of caste and creed. Or that the economic issue would wither the communal problem. Or that careful constitutional provisions for protections for minorities would take care of it. Or that communalism would be defeated, top-down, by the secular intelligentsia and liberal elites.

After Independence, in a country spooked by Partition and its terrible violence and uprooting, the communal problem was allowed to fester, largely untended. The sly tokenism and opportunism that has masqueraded as secular politics failed to assuage minority insecurities while stoking resentments in the majority. Now, the BJP has stepped into the absence and weaponised it.

The BJP’s successes call for a new imagination of secular politics. In the 1990s, the Mandal moment gave caste politics the democratic frame of “social justice”. Today, laid low by the BJP’s conquests, the Opposition could work out a framework of pluralism in which to set the new secular politics — which acknowledges religious difference with respect and reciprocity, instead of avoiding eye-contact with it.

The writer is National Opinion Editor, The Indian Express. vandita.mishra@expressindia.com