Discuss how a change of ruling party at the State level, driven by anti-incumbency, can nonetheless perpetuate pre-existing patronage networks. Illustrate with a recent example.

Patronage networks — informal chains through which local intermediaries distribute jobs, contracts and control over the informal economy in exchange for political loyalty — are structures, not persons. An anti-incumbency verdict changes who occupies power; by itself it rarely dismantles what makes power profitable.

Why the network survives the change of guard

• Defection as the vehicle of expansion: a fast-growing challenger absorbs the incumbent's leaders wholesale. The Tenth Schedule penalises individual defection, but its two-thirds "merger" exemption legitimises bloc crossovers [1] — the same personnel return to power under a new flag.
• Rents are locational, not ideological: control over transport stands, mining, ration distribution and civic contracts is tied to territory; whoever holds the locality inherits the rent stream.
• Unreformed election finance: the Second ARC's Ethics in Governance report traces criminalisation of politics to the money–muscle–election-funding cycle, which no change of government automatically breaks [2].
• Administrative convenience: a new government thin on organisational depth finds a ready-made network useful for mobilisation and local order.

Illustration: West Bengal, 2026

• The BJP won a majority in the 2026 Assembly election, ending fifteen years of Trinamool rule [3]; Suvendu Adhikari, himself a 2020 TMC defector, became Chief Minister on 9 May 2026 [4].
• The mandate was explicitly against extortion, strongman politics, unemployment and youth out-migration [4].
• Yet roughly a hundred days on, controllers of auto and e-rickshaw stands and local strongmen are reported to have simply switched allegiance — the system acquiring new managers rather than being dismantled [4].
• The parallel three-way tussle between the RSS, State president Samik Bhattacharya and the Chief Minister over absorbing these networks shows the real contest has moved inside the winning party [4].

Electoral change is therefore a necessary but insufficient condition for rupture. Durable reform lies in institutional design — transparent e-tendering, formalising and licensing the informal transport economy, empowered and audited local bodies, and time-bound adjudication of defection petitions [1][2]. Only when patronage stops paying will an anti-incumbency mandate translate into genuine renewal.