India, May 4 -- To pre-empt self-fulfilling liberal alibis tending toward epitaphs of Indian democracy, let me begin this column with a caveat that paraphrases Carl von Clausewitz's famous quote on war: Institutions are a continuation of politics by other means. More on this later. But let us now look at the state election results and their characteristic features one by one.

In Assam, the BJP secured a third consecutive win. The Congress needs to look at only one statistic to understand its overall predicament: It scored a hat-trick of having more Muslims than Hindus among its MLAs even though the former account for just one-third of the state's population.

In West Bengal, the BJP finally managed to unseat the TMC. The BJP's 45% vote s...