Prateek Tanmay
3 min readNew DelhiJul 21, 2026 08:24 PM IST
The Indian Institute of Management (IIM) Calcutta is developing a management case study on the Bharatiya Janata Party’s (BJP) organisational strategy during its electoral campaign in West Bengal. The institute said the study will be used for academic purposes and taught to management students to examine strategy, organisational capability and leadership in a non-business setting.
The case study is being prepared by IIM Calcutta Director Prof Alok Kumar Rai, Prof Ramya T Venkateswaran of the Strategy Group and Prof Bodhibrata Nag, retired professor from the Operations Group. Once completed, it will be published through the IIM Calcutta Case Research Centre in collaboration with Ivy Publishing, making it available to business schools and management institutions in India and abroad.
According to the institute, the case study will examine the organisational and strategic aspects of the BJP’s campaign in West Bengal. It aims to analyse how organisational structures, leadership and management principles were used during the campaign and whether they offer lessons that can be applied in management education.
As part of the research, the team has interacted with Sunil Bansal, BJP’s election in-charge for West Bengal, Samik Bhattacharya, the party’s West Bengal president, and former state president Sukanta Majumdar. The researchers are also attempting to interact with Union Home Minister Amit Shah and West Bengal Chief Minister Suvendu Adhikari to gather additional perspectives for the study.
The case study will examine how grassroots organisational capabilities were developed and the role of booth-level structures, cadre motivation, constituency segmentation, communication strategy, candidate selection and local outreach in building electoral competitiveness. It will also assess whether organisational capabilities developed in one political and cultural environment can be transferred to another with different social and political conditions.
The researchers will apply several established management frameworks, including the Resource-Based View (RBV), VRIO Framework, McKinsey 7-S Framework and Dynamic Capabilities Theory, to analyse organisational resources, alignment and adaptability. The study will also explore whether capabilities built during an election campaign can be translated into governance after assuming office.
IIM Calcutta said the project will be accompanied by a detailed teaching note to help faculty members use the case in classrooms. The case is intended to encourage discussion on whether the BJP’s performance in the 2026 West Bengal Assembly elections can be understood as a sustainable competitive advantage, a resource-based advantage or the result of campaign execution in a specific political context.
