The world’s biggest democracy is about to become a one-party state

When Narendra Modi first campaigned to lead the country, more than a decade ago, he raised the slogan of a “Congress-free India”, plotting the elimination of his only national opposition.

Congress, the founding party of independent India, has since withered. It has hardly recovered from 2014, when its seats in the national parliament slumped from 206 to just 44 in one election. It lost its grip on state legislatures, too, and now controls only four states to the 21 held by Modi’s governing alliance.

Its decline left regional parties across India as the most important counterweight to Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) and its Hindu nationalist agenda. Their leaders ranged against him in the north, south, east and west. Two of the most charismatic and formidable were Mamata Banerjee, the chief minister of West Bengal since 2011, and M.K. Stalin, chief minister of Tamil Nadu since 2021.

This week, with election defeats for both Banerjee and Stalin, Modi finds himself at the helm of an India in which his opponents hold virtually no political power. Congress has held a greater number of seats in parliament, at points. But more than at any time since democracy was suspended in the 1970s Emergency, Modi has made India look like a one-leader state.

“The idea of India” formulated by Jawaharlal Nehru, its first prime minister after independence, was the ideal of a political pluralism to match the vast country’s human diversity of religion, language and culture. Nowadays, as India’s surviving smaller parties dwindle, that dream looks like a quaint loser to the BJP’s 100-year-old vision of a Hindu nation.

‘Modi was like a wounded tiger in 2024. Now he is out to serve his revenge cold.’

Sugata Srinivasaraju, political commentator

The BJP has always prided itself on its members’ ideological commitment. Uniting Hindus, who belong to many different caste communities but form an evenly distributed 80 per cent of the population across the country, has been the party’s strategy. In recent decades, it has picked up organisational discipline like no other national party, as well as a business-friendly reputation that made it the darling of the donor class.

Supporters say the recent string of state-level victories is the result of hard work put in by the BJP after its setback in the last national elections. When the votes were counted in June 2024, its alliance had won only 42.5 per cent of the vote, as the opposition hammered Modi over chronic unemployment and inequality. The BJP managed to stay in control, but only after Modi roped two regional parties into a coalition government.

“Modi was like a wounded tiger in 2024. Now he is out to serve his revenge cold,” said Sugata Srinivasaraju, a political commentator who has written critically about Congress and the BJP.

Modi’s march through the states brought surprise after surprise, each to the BJP’s advantage. The party won in Haryana in October 2024, though Congress had been heavily favoured. Then it went into Maharashtra, home to Mumbai, the country’s commercial capital, run by two powerful regional parties, and split each of them in two to collect the victory.

The losing parties cried foul and complained about the methods. Congress pointed out irregularities, such as a photo of a Brazilian hairdresser appearing 22 times in one state’s voter roll. The BJP dismissed the claim, and the Election Commission defended the fairness of the polls.

Last year, the BJP took hold of Delhi, the capital, for the first time in 27 years, tearing down Arvind Kejriwal, among the few politicians to have challenged Modi’s rise since 2014. Kejriwal and his lieutenants were constantly raided and arrested by federal police on charges that never resulted in conviction – evidence, they argued, that Modi was wielding the tools of government as a weapon.

On the way to winning the state of Bihar last year, the Election Commission of India, which is supposed to be independent but has a leader chosen by Modi, started an intensive housekeeping exercise to remove names that didn’t belong on voter rolls. The hectic process prevented many people from voting. Members of the state’s Muslim minority said they were targeted unfairly with deletion. In the end, as in West Bengal this week, the vote in Bihar was not even close.

The revision of the West Bengal voter lists, which struck off 9 million names and left at least 2.7 million actual people unable to cast ballots, again played a role in helping the BJP pit Muslims against Hindus. But the scale of the party’s sweep against Banerjee was so great that the thwarted voters alone cannot explain away the victory. Many Bengalis simply wanted to vote out Banerjee’s party.

Shibu Singha, 47, who sells vegetable juice in front of a British colonial monument in the centre of Kolkata, said he had voted for Banerjee in previous elections. But now, he said, Banerjee was “protecting Muslims at the cost of Hindus”, and he was worried about the economy. “No industry is coming to Bengal; youths are not getting jobs,” he said.

Down south in Tamil Nadu, which eschews the BJP and other national parties, the economy is moving at a faster pace. But Stalin, the head of the Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam (DMK) party, lost badly – and so did his main rival, from a similar party. Both were trounced by a newcomer, a media-savvy actor who goes by the name Vijay. Votes for Vijay, like votes against Banerjee, were votes for change.

Modi has been in power for 12 years and, despite persistent growth, India is facing difficult economic conditions, like high fuel prices and inflation, which matter most to most voters, along with unemployment. A study from Azim Premji University, focusing on the quarter-billion young Indians in the workforce, showed that for every 5 million who earn degrees each year, only 2.8 million find jobs.

And yet, voter dissatisfaction about the economy has not turned them against Modi – at least not enough to defeat him in the polls.

“I must give credit to the BJP’s electoral machinery,” said Arati Jerath, a political analyst in New Delhi. “They worked meticulously on the ground [in West Bengal], mapping the constituencies and the demographics, trying to see what cracks in Mamata’s support they can widen.”