| Prime Minister Narendra Modi in Kolkata on Saturday. Bikas Das/Associated Press |
Why Narendra Modi has no rivals left
By Alex Travelli
When Narendra Modi first campaigned to lead India more than a decade ago, he vowed not to just defeat the main opposing national party, but to eliminate it entirely. He pretty much succeeded.
Congress, the founding party of independent India and the country’s only national opposition party, barely exists as a governing force. It holds fewer than 100 seats in the country’s 543-member Parliament; it controls only four out of India’s 28 states.
That has left the country’s regional parties and their leaders as the most important counterweight to Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party and its Hindu nationalist agenda.
But over the past two years, the B.J.P. has been laser-focused on winning state elections across the country. It has notched victory after victory — and in doing so, has steadily chipped away at this source of opposition, too.
Then, last week, the B.J.P. won legislative elections in West Bengal, one of the country’s most populous states and an opposition stronghold it had never come close to ruling. Its win ended 15 years of rule by Mamata Banerjee, one of Modi’s most outspoken critics.
The result is that today, Modi finds himself at the helm of an India in which his opponents hold almost no political power. The world’s most populous democracy looks a lot like a one-party state.
A string of triumphs
Just two years ago, the electorate seemed to be tiring of Modi, after a decade that included Covid-19 and an economy that was delivering too few jobs for too many ambitious young Indians.
In the most recent national election in June 2024, his alliance won 42.5 percent of the vote. The B.J.P. managed to stay in control, but only after Modi roped two regional parties into a coalition government.
The shock was profound. It also concentrated minds.
Since then, Modi’s administration has avoided the flashy and contentious projects that he took on during his first two terms as prime minister — like invalidating India’s currency, revoking Kashmir’s statehood or building a giant temple to the Hindu god Ram — and instead has focused on bread-and-butter issues. His party, the B.J.P., has gone door-to-door across India, refining tactics, recruiting former rivals as candidates and reaching out to new voters.
The result has been a string of unexpected triumphs: Haryana in the north in October 2024, where Congress was heavily favored; Maharashtra, home to Mumbai, the country’s commercial capital, a month later; Delhi last February, which the B.J.P. won for the first time in 27 years; Bihar, also in the north, last fall.
| Supporters of Modi’s party celebrated in Kolkata last week. Sahiba Chawdhary/Reuters |
How has the B.J.P. pulled this off? Some of it is local circumstances. In West Bengal, for instance, voters told us they were sick of a sluggish economy and the state’s corruption.
But many of the B.J.P.’s opponents have also cried foul. In Delhi, the former chief minister and his lieutenants were repeatedly raided and arrested by federal police on charges that never resulted in conviction. Modi, they argue, was abusing the tools of government to harass them.
In Bihar, 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. Members of the state’s Muslim minority said they were targeted unfairly with deletion. Something similar happened in West Bengal, where 9 million names, disproportionately belonging to Muslims, were struck from voter rolls.
Some argued that these efforts played into Modi’s strategy of whipping up anti-Muslim sentiment to win Hindu voters. And in both cases, these moves disenfranchised Muslim voters.
But in both Bihar and West Bengal, the election results were also not close enough for these machinations to have made the critical difference.
“The idea of India”
Whether by fair means or foul, the B.J.P. has become an election-winning machine. Last year, estimates suggest it raised 10 times more money than all of its opponents combined.
It’s not clear when, or if, Modi, will face any real political competition again. The next time India elects a new Parliament, in 2029, Modi will be 78. No one knows whether he will represent his party then or who might replace him, or what sort of India he will leave behind when he finally goes.
“The idea of India,” as formulated by Jawaharlal Nehru, its first prime minister after independence, was the ideal of political pluralism to match the country’s human diversity of religion, language and culture.
Nowadays, however, India’s surviving smaller parties are dwindling. Across the country, they’re being replaced by an electoral juggernaut focused on building an orthodox Hindu nation, led by an organization that defines India in terms of a cultural majority.
Against this backdrop, Nehru’s idea of India is looking increasingly like a relic.