The Case Against the BJP, in Numbers That Hold Up
This piece grew out of three posts on r/india — Why You Should Not Vote for BJP, Part 1: Education and Part 2 — whose author did the work of assembling much of the underlying research and pointed me toward most of the sources cited below. The argument, the writing, and any errors here are mine. Where my numbers differ from theirs, I have gone back to the primary source and said so.
There is a particular way Indian elections get discussed now, and it is worth naming before anything else. The question is never "what did this government do about school enrolment," it is "Modi or Rahul." Never "was the strategic petroleum reserve expanded," but "who is stronger." The contest is framed as a choice between personalities, and once you accept that framing you have already lost the argument, because personalities are matters of taste and there is no arguing with taste.
So let me try a different approach. Forget who you like. Here is a record. Judge it.
I want to be honest about what follows. Some of the claims circulating in anti-BJP arguments online are exaggerated, and I have cut them. Some of what I found is worse than what gets alleged. Every factual claim below links to its source. If you think I have got something wrong, click through and check — that is the entire point.
Part One: What India Was Building
The idea we inherited
For most of our history, Indians lived by an idea of dharma that prized social stability over individual rebellion. Society ran on self-regulating mechanisms that insulated daily life from whichever dynasty happened to be rising or falling. It was durable, and it made large-scale revolt rare.
Independence brought a different proposition. Nehru's phrase for it was "scientific temper" — the disposition to reason logically, to refuse claims without evidence, and to abandon a cherished belief when the facts turn against it. He treated it as inseparable from freedom itself: a people who cannot think independently cannot govern themselves.
He then spent seventeen years building institutions to make it real. National funding for scientific research grew from ₹24 million in 1947 to ₹550 million by 1964. He founded the IITs and deliberately sourced their institutional models from different countries — the United States at Kanpur, the Soviet Union at Bombay, West Germany at Madras — so Indian students would encounter more than one scientific tradition. Recognising that excellence in a few metros would not diffuse on its own, he backed the Regional Engineering Colleges that became the NITs. He set up CSIR and served as its ex-officio president while national laboratories went up across the country. With Homi Bhabha he founded TIFR in 1945, the Atomic Energy Commission in 1948, and the Trombay establishment that became BARC in 1954. With Vikram Sarabhai he founded INCOSPAR in 1962, which became ISRO.
He also showed up. He attended the Indian Science Congress every year of his tenure, and travelled to the 1963 International Cosmic Ray Conference in person.
It worked. TIFR built TIFRAC, one of India's first digital computers, between 1956 and 1960. Asia's first nuclear reactor, Apsara, went critical at Trombay in 1956. The Kolar Gold Fields experiment detected atmospheric neutrinos in 1965, beating a South African group by weeks. The Narasimhan–Seshadri theorem, also 1965, became foundational to modern theoretical physics. Govind Swarup built the Ooty Radio Telescope and later the GMRT near Pune, still among the world's most powerful low-frequency arrays. And the Green Revolution under M.S. Swaminathan broke India's structural dependence on food aid.
Here is the part that matters for this argument: for sixty years, no government seriously contested this. Parties came and went and the scientific temper survived them all. As late as 2006 the UPA was still building on it, founding the IISERs and NISER. In 2005 it tasked NCERT with rewriting school curricula, producing the National Curriculum Framework — a genuine watershed that moved Indian schooling away from rote learning toward inquiry, scepticism and the questioning of dogma. A 2% education cess bankrolled Sarva Shiksha Abhiyan and the Mid-Day Meal Scheme. INSPIRE launched in 2008 to make pure science a fundable career from school through doctorate. KVPY was expanded to catch research talent early. The Right to Education Act passed in 2009.
None of this was perfect. All of it pointed the same direction.
The other philosophy
A rival tradition ran alongside it the whole time, and you need to understand it to understand 2026.
Where Nehru diagnosed India's problem as material and social backwardness curable by looking forward, this school diagnosed moral degradation and internal fragmentation, curable only by looking inward and reviving civilisational pride. V.D. Savarkar set out its terms in Hindutva: Who Is a Hindu? in 1923, defining a Hindu as one who treats India as both motherland and holy land — a definition that does arithmetic on who belongs. His work influenced K.B. Hedgewar to found the RSS in 1925. The organisation's second chief, M.S. Golwalkar, codified the doctrine in We or Our Nationhood Defined (1939) and Bunch of Thoughts (1960), arguing that the nation is an organic ancient cultural entity rather than a political community constituted by a legal document. In the earlier book he pointed to Nazi Germany's treatment of its minorities as an instructive example of race pride.
I am citing that because it is documented, not as an analogy. It matters for a specific reason: an ideology that locates the nation in culture rather than in a constitution has no particular reason to prize evidence, and every reason to prize reverence.
Believing that social character-building mattered more than political agitation, the RSS under Golwalkar stayed clear of the Quit India movement in 1942. Savarkar himself mocked the organisation's caution, summarising a volunteer's life as being born, joining the RSS, and dying without having accomplished anything.
In 2008, Narendra Modi published Jyotipunj, profiling sixteen RSS figures who had shaped him. Golwalkar appears as "Pujniya Shri Guruji" — teacher worthy of worship. Modi writes of him as leader and scientist, and wonders whether he was ever spiritual.
Keep that word "worship" in mind. What follows is what happens to an education system when the people running it believe reverence is the higher value.
Part Two: The Education Record
The money
The BJP's 2014 manifesto committed to raising public spending on education to 6% of GDP, and the National Education Policy of 2020 restated the target. It is a good target; the Kothari Commission recommended it in 1966.
According to the Economic Survey, general government spending on education — Centre and states combined — was 3.1% of GDP in 2013–14 and fell to about 2.8% across the first Modi term. It ticked up to 2.9% at the end of the decade, came in at 2.7% in 2021–22, and the budget estimate for 2023–24 was 2.7% again.
You will sometimes see larger figures cited, closer to 4.4%, from the Education Ministry's own budgeted-expenditure series, which counts differently. Use whichever series you prefer, but use the same one for both periods. On a consistent measure, spending did not rise toward 6%. It drifted down and stayed there.
The schools
A NITI Aayog analysis found roughly 94,000 government schools ceased operating between 2014–15 and 2024–25, a fall from 11.07 lakh to 10.13 lakh. Over the same decade private schools grew from 2.88 lakh to 3.39 lakh, enrolment fell by 2.26 crore, and the transition rate from upper primary to secondary dropped from 91.58% to 86.6%.
The honest counterpoint matters: fertility has fallen and there are genuinely fewer children in many districts, school consolidation is a defensible policy, and education sits on the Concurrent List, so states do most of the closing — Madhya Pradesh and Odisha disproportionately.
But notice what the defence concedes. If consolidation is pursued for quality, the savings should show up as quality. Instead spending fell. India still has over 1.17 lakh single-teacher government schools and fewer than half have computers. You cannot call the closures an efficiency measure and preside over falling investment. One of those has to give.
Dismantling the pipeline
The specifics are worse than the aggregates, because they show intent rather than drift.
The curriculum. During the 2022–24 NCERT "rationalisation" drives, chapters on the periodic table, evolution, energy sources and democracy were trimmed or dropped from Class 9 and 10 science and social science. Sections on the Mughal era, Gandhi's assassination and the 2002 Gujarat riots went too. Consider what it means to teach chemistry without the periodic table and biology without Darwin. These are not details. They are the organising frameworks — the things that turn facts into understanding. Their removal is the precise inverse of what NCF 2005 set out to do.
The talent filter. In 2022 the government scrapped KVPY and folded it into INSPIRE-SHE, arguing the exam cost more to run than the fellowships were worth. KVPY was a high-difficulty aptitude test designed by IISc that rewarded pattern recognition and derivation rather than application, with interviews by working scientists, open from Class 11 onward. INSPIRE-SHE selects on Class 12 board marks or JEE/NEET rank, with no interview. The substitution rewards diligence over creativity — a student with 99% in boards is conscientious, not necessarily a researcher. IISc's Dipshikha Chakravortty said of KVPY students that she had not seen comparable candidates emerge from any other exam. Closing it pushed every pure-science aspirant back through the engineering and medical funnel. And the replacement is itself faltering: DST did not issue fresh registration notifications for recent entry cycles.
The safety nets. In January 2019 the government scrapped the no-detention policy, letting states fail students in Classes 5 and 8 — against the express logic of the 2009 RTE Act, which was designed to keep marginal children in school. In December 2022 the Maulana Azad National Fellowship was discontinued on grounds of overlap, removing a dedicated research pathway for minority scholars. Under NEP 2020, the four-year undergraduate programme introduced multiple exit points; early evidence suggests socio-economically marginalised students use those exits disproportionately, leaving with a certificate instead of a degree.
The money that vanished. In 2018 Sarva Shiksha Abhiyan lost its standalone identity, merged into Samagra Shiksha. The consolidation diluted a legally protected budget line, and what followed is documented. Kerala, Tamil Nadu and West Bengal received no funds at all under the scheme for an entire financial year — all opposition-governed. In Goa, roughly ₹5 crore was siphoned from scheme accounts by an accused holding thirteen bank accounts. In Uttar Pradesh, over 13,000 new textbooks meant for free distribution to poor children were intercepted being sold as scrap paper. A CAG audit found large shares of scheme funds sitting unspent while schools went short of books and uniforms.
The universities. In 2017 direct infrastructure grants to central universities were replaced with loans from the Higher Education Funding Agency. A public university that wants a laboratory now borrows for it — and repays by raising fees. Delhi University doubled components of its annual charges twice in one year following HEFA borrowing. This is how a public good is quietly converted into a priced service, without any debate about whether that is what anyone wanted.
The regulator that is about to arrive
On 15 December 2025 the education minister introduced the Viksit Bharat Shiksha Adhishthan Bill, which would dissolve the UGC, AICTE and NCTE and replace them with one central regulator. Opposition MPs called it a power grab; the bill went to a 31-member joint parliamentary committee.
The objections were not partisan noise. IIT-Kanpur, IIT-Hyderabad, IIM-Sambalpur and IISER-Mohali asked to be exempted entirely; IIT-Madras asked to be exempted from provisions requiring central approval for online programmes and new campuses, arguing that clearance requirements would cripple an institution that has to move quickly. Andhra Pradesh, Kerala, Madhya Pradesh and Meghalaya objected on federalism grounds — and the sharpest opposition came from Andhra Pradesh, governed by the TDP, the BJP's largest coalition partner. Teachers' groups noted the new body would regulate without holding funding powers, all stick and no carrot.
The committee's report was adopted as the monsoon session opened this month. It flagged the concentration of power in a single regulator and recommended safeguards — and then broadly endorsed the bill anyway. It is scheduled for passage now.
In fairness, the problem it addresses is real: institutions currently comply with more than fifty separate regulations across multiple bodies, and nobody thinks that is good. The question is whether the answer is one body with the power to write rules for the IITs without a statutory duty to consult them.
The NTA
Which brings us to the institution that has done more to discredit Indian education than any policy on this list.
Start with what the National Testing Agency legally is. It is not a statutory body created by an Act of Parliament like the UPSC, nor a constitutional body like the Election Commission. It was registered in 2017 as a society under the Societies Registration Act of 1860 — the same instrument used to register NGOs, residents' welfare associations and charitable trusts.
That is not a technicality. This society decides the academic fate of roughly ten million students a year through NEET, JEE and CUET, while sitting outside the oversight framework that governs genuine public institutions. It answers to a governing body of bureaucrats rather than to Parliament. Conceived as a self-sustaining testing organisation, it behaves like one: it outsources the actual conduct of exams — invigilation, server management, physical security — to private vendors and sub-contracted schools. Almost every failure has occurred precisely at those outsourced sites, where the NTA has no direct administrative control. And when something goes wrong, an NGO-shaped body substantially investigates itself.
Now the record.
In 2021, JEE Main was manipulated by remote access: at compromised centres, security software was bypassed so an off-site solver could take control of a candidate's machine over the LAN and answer in real time. The CBI arrested NTA insiders alongside private centre operators.
In 2022, CUET-UG collapsed operationally — exams cancelled at centres after servers failed and wrong papers were uploaded.
In 2024, NEET-UG produced the grace-marks fiasco: 1,563 candidates were awarded compensatory marks under an opaque formula borrowed from a law-entrance judgment, and 67 candidates ended on a perfect 720. Bihar police alleged the paper had been leaked and memorised the day before by candidates who paid ₹30–32 lakh. The NTA's initial public position was that leak reports were baseless. Weeks later UGC-NET was cancelled a day after it was held, the paper having been sold on Telegram and the dark web.
And then 2026, which removed any remaining argument that these were isolated incidents. NEET-UG was held on 3 May. A "guess paper" circulating in Rajasthan turned out to contain over 100 questions matching the real exam. The NTA initially called the leak claims false and fraudulent and threatened action against those spreading them. On 12 May it cancelled the exam, affecting more than 22 lakh candidates. A re-test was held on 21 June. In May, CUET-UG failed too, with over 3,700 students leaving centres after biometric verification servers went down.
Earlier this month the CBI told a special court what it had found. A Latur coaching-centre owner paid ₹5 lakh to a member of the NTA's own paper-setting panel to procure chemistry questions. Forensic recovery from seized phones produced 111 questions matching the NTA master set. Thirteen people are in judicial custody.
The leak did not get past the system. It came from inside it.
There is also a quieter problem. Across multi-shift exams the NTA normalises scores by percentile, so a student in an easier shift can be penalised relative to one who scored lower in a harder shift — while the agency rarely publishes the shift-wise raw data that would let anyone verify the normalisation, and has resisted RTI requests on paper-setting protocols by claiming intellectual property.
Coaching mafias and cheating networks are not new. What is new is an examination authority structured so that it cannot be held to account, staffed at the edges by contractors it does not control, and insulated from the scrutiny that would have caught any of this early. Ask who created the NTA in that form, and who was responsible for fixing it across eight years and four national scandals.
Part Three: The Wider Record
Energy security
This deserves more attention than it gets, because it is the clearest example of how priorities show up years later as vulnerability.
India imports more than 88% of its crude oil, roughly 40% of it through the Strait of Hormuz. Against that exposure sit three salt-cavern facilities — Visakhapatnam, Mangalore, Padur — holding 5.33 million tonnes, about nine and a half days of consumption. All built in the previous decade.
Phase II was approved in July 2021: 4 MMT at Chandikhol and 2.5 MMT at Padur, roughly doubling capacity. The IEA benchmark for major importers is ninety days.
It has not been built. A parliamentary committee found slow execution, unresolved land and contract issues, and repeated budget cuts: for 2023–24, a budget estimate of ₹508 crore was revised down to ₹40 crore, with no expenditure incurred at all. The projects were structured as public-private partnerships to ease the fiscal burden, and private capital proved reluctant to fund an asset whose purpose is to sit unused until a crisis. The first PPP component found a taker only in 2025. Analysts note even completing Phase II leaves India short.
Then, in early 2026, Brent went from $80 to $120 in under a week as Hormuz closed. Every $10 rise widens the current account deficit by 40 to 50 basis points.
The oil shock was not the government's fault. The state of the buffer when it arrived was entirely the government's choice.
Chabahar
Chabahar was for a decade the centrepiece of India's connectivity strategy — the route to Central Asia bypassing Pakistan. India secured a US sanctions waiver in 2018.
On 16 September 2025 the State Department revoked it. Washington later extended conditional protection to 26 April 2026, an extension reporting indicates was meant to let India wind down. India nonetheless paid the remaining $120 million in February 2026. India-nominated directors resigned and the operating company's website went dark. The Union Budget of 1 February 2026 allocated nothing at all, the first such omission in nearly a decade. In March the MEA confirmed no further obligation remained. Reports since describe a proposal to transfer India's stake to an Iranian entity.
We paid the last instalment on the way out, zeroed the budget line, and let the clock run out. Reasonable people can argue India had no good options once Washington chose maximum pressure — but opposition parties accused the government of buckling under pressure, and it is hard to look at the sequencing and see a plan.
The rupee, honestly
You will see claims that the rupee's fall is a direct product of the 2024 budget's capital gains changes. It does not hold up, so I am not making that argument.
The rupee hit an all-time low of ₹96.84 on 20 May, recovering to about ₹94 by late June — down 10.15% over twelve months. Foreign portfolio investors withdrew ₹2.2 lakh crore from equities, a record ₹1.17 lakh crore in March alone. The drivers are overwhelmingly external: crude, outflows and geopolitical risk are the identified triggers, with earlier pressure from a strong dollar and tariff concerns.
External shocks are not a policy failure; exposure to them is. India met this one with nine days of crude cover, no strategic gas reserve, and LNG stocks of 10–14 days, forcing an emergency order requiring terminals to hold back a tenth of every shipment. The government did not cause the storm. It spent a decade declining to build the roof.
The information environment
Everything above is arguable on the merits. This part is about whether arguing on the merits is still possible.
Major networks now sit with groups close to the establishment — Adani's acquisition of NDTV, Reliance's ownership of Network18. Below that tier, economics does the same work: the Union government is the largest advertiser in the country at roughly ₹15 crore a day, and for a regional channel that line is the difference between making payroll and not. Nobody needs to issue an instruction.
The result is a shift away from field reporting toward studio combat, where the question is not why a scheme is failing but which side is patriotic. Critics get labelled "anti-national" or "urban Naxal", which removes any need to understand the policy.
You can measure the consequence. A tracker of hate speech by elected officials found a roughly 500% increase after 2014, over 80% of it from BJP leaders. Rhetoric at the top has included calling migrants "termites" and, in 2024, describing Muslim citizens as "infiltrators" who would receive redistributed Hindu wealth under an opposition government. During the pandemic, an outbreak traced to one gathering became a sustained "Corona Jihad" campaign framing a minority as a biological hazard.
The scholarly framing is more useful than the ones that get thrown around, and more damning for being sober: Christophe Jaffrelot's term is "ethnic democracy" — a system where elections, courts and a constitution genuinely function while one community's claim to the nation is systematically privileged. It is not a dictatorship. That is the point. It does not need to be.
The asymmetry
Human Rights Watch documented at least 44 people killed by cow vigilantes between May 2015 and December 2018 across twelve states, 36 of them Muslim, with police repeatedly delaying cases against attackers while filing prompt counter-cases against victims. IndiaSpend's tracker found 84% of those killed in cow-related violence were Muslim and 97% of attacks came after 2014, before the tracker shut down.
Amnesty International documented over 128 properties demolished across five states after communal incidents — overwhelmingly Muslim-owned, justified as encroachment removal but executed within 24 to 48 hours without notice or process. The Supreme Court intervened in 2024, staying arbitrary demolitions and holding that the executive cannot find a person guilty and destroy their home. The UN human rights office called for a halt in June 2025.
Meanwhile, in 2018 a Union minister publicly garlanded men convicted of lynching a Muslim trader after their release on bail. In 2022 Gujarat remitted the sentences of all eleven men convicted of gang-raping Bilkis Bano and murdering her family; they were met with sweets and garlands. The Supreme Court quashed the remission.
Note who keeps intervening. The courts are still working. Hold that thought.
The franchise
The Special Intensive Revision of electoral rolls began as a Bihar pilot on 24 June 2025, pruning about 65 lakh names. Phase two covered twelve states and union territories, where the electorate fell from 50.99 crore to 45.81 crore — over 5.18 crore names, or 10.2%.
Of those, 66,88,636 were deceased electors and a further 63.16 lakh removed after adjudication. The remainder is what should hold your attention: roughly four and a half crore living citizens removed for documentation gaps, changed residence, or absence during enumeration. It continues in nineteen more states.
Registration is not automatic. Nobody will put those names back. Migrant workers registered in native districts while working far away had to choose between lost wages and losing the vote.
And then the detail that changes what this is. People deleted during SIR are being excluded from welfare benefits in West Bengal and Bihar, both governments having linked roll data to social security. A process justified as electoral hygiene now determines whether a family eats.
In fairness, the Supreme Court unanimously upheld the SIR's constitutional validity in March 2026, and roll maintenance had genuinely been neglected. But constitutionality and wisdom are different questions.
Set this beside two other things. The Citizenship Amendment Act offers a documentation route back to citizenship for Hindus, Sikhs, Christians, Jains, Buddhists and Parsis — explicitly not Muslims. A nationwide NRC would put the burden of documentary proof on every individual. Each is defensible on its own terms by its defenders. Together they describe a machine: strip the rolls, demand papers, and provide an exemption available to everyone except one community.
The seats
In April 2026 the government brought a delimitation package including a constitutional amendment to redraw seats on the 2011 census and expand the Lok Sabha by half.
At current House strength, Tamil Nadu would fall from 39 seats to 32 and Kerala from 20 to 15, while Uttar Pradesh rises from 80 to 89 and Bihar from 40 to 46 — a relative shift that holds even if the total grows. On 2026 projections, Bihar, UP and Rajasthan gain twenty-six seats while Kerala, Tamil Nadu and Andhra Pradesh lose twenty-one.
Be fair about this: "one person, one vote" is a real principle and the south genuinely is over-represented per capita. Carnegie describes a dual asymmetry — southern states hold disproportionate representation while northern states receive disproportionate fiscal transfers. Delimitation corrects the first and leaves the second alone.
But the freeze was explicitly designed to reward states that pursued population control. Tamil Nadu and Kerala did what national policy asked. Unwinding that bargain unilaterally is not neutral arithmetic.
The amendment was voted down.
The point about the opposition
The most successful political messaging of the last decade is that the opposition is weak, fractured and dynastic — that there is no alternative, so the question does not arise.
Consider what actually happened. The delimitation amendment failed. The demolitions were stayed. The Bilkis Bano remissions were reversed. The NEET leaks became national scandals rather than footnotes because people refused to let them go. The VBSA Bill went to a committee that forced safeguards onto it, pushed hardest by the IITs, four state governments, and the BJP's own largest ally.
None of that was the work of a weak opposition, and none of it happened by itself. What has stopped the most consequential measures is the arithmetic of a two-thirds majority the BJP does not have, and a Supreme Court that has repeatedly said no. Both are contingent. Neither is guaranteed.
So how should you vote
Not for a face. Not against one either.
Look at what a government said it would do and what it did. Six percent of GDP on education, or two point seven. Ninety days of oil cover, or nine. A corridor to Central Asia, or a budget line quietly zeroed. An electoral roll cleaned up, or four and a half crore living citizens told to prove themselves again. A chemistry syllabus with the periodic table in it, or without.
That last one is the smallest item on the list and, I think, the most revealing. A government that removes the periodic table from a science textbook and hands the national examination system to a registered society is not making a series of unrelated administrative errors. It is expressing a view about what education is for — and it is not the view Nehru argued for, or the one most Indians have quietly assumed for three generations.
You do not have to admire anyone in the opposition to conclude that a decade and a half is long enough to be judged on results. You do not have to believe India is becoming a dictatorship — I don't think it is — to notice that the institutions currently doing the restraining are running out of slack.
Vote the record. It is all any of us can actually read.