Firing all its guns, the BJP has finally managed to defeat Mamata Banerjee’s TMC in West Bengal, where she had been in power since 2011 after ending 34 years of Left Front rule. The state had long been seen as one of the strongest regional barriers to the BJP’s eastward expansion.
In Delhi, last year, the BJP ended AAP’s decade-long dominance, which had begun with Arvind Kejriwal’s brief 2013 government and was consolidated through landslide victories in 2015 and 2020.
In Odisha, Naveen Patnaik’s Biju Janata Dal, which had dominated the state for more than two decades, was displaced in 2024 by a BJP that capitalised on anti-incumbency and aggressive organisational expansion.
These are not separate state-level political stories. Taken together, they raise a larger question: Is India’s opposition merely losing elections to the Modi-Shah machine, or losing the very ground on which elections are fought?
The central question is no longer whether the BJP is India’s dominant national party, but whether India’s federal opposition space is being squeezed out, state by state.
When BJP’s Double Engine Overtakes the Locomotives
Over the last decade, Indian electoral politics has become increasingly BJP-centric, both at the national and state levels. By May 2026, the BJP-led National Democratic Alliance is in power, or poised to be in power, in 22 of India’s 31 legislative units, with the BJP itself holding chief ministerial positions in 16 states and set to add another after Bengal.
The BJP’s “double-engine” slogan, referring to the same party governing both New Delhi and the state, has become more than campaign language. The wider the BJP-led NDA expands, the stronger the perception of inevitability becomes. Political coherence within India’s federal tradition is gradually diminishing.
Voters, bureaucrats, business groups, local elites, and media institutions often adjust to where they believe durable power lies.
The central question is no longer whether the BJP is India’s dominant national party, but whether India’s federal opposition space is being squeezed out, state by state.
The Modi-Shah Machine and the Politics of Defection
Historically, the Indian National Congress has been the only national party capable of competing across regions and anchoring opposition politics when out of power. That role has sharply weakened. Across much of the Hindi belt, western India, central India, and the Northeast, Congress has either been defeated by the BJP or reduced to a secondary force.
West Bengal, Delhi, and Odisha show how quickly regional strongholds can weaken. Within a span of two years, in Bengal, the BJP breached the TMC’s long-held resistance; in Delhi, it overcame AAP’s decade-long governance-centred appeal; and in Odisha, it ended the BJD’s two-decade dominance.
In 2022, the Maharashtra drama offered the clearest example of how opposition space can shrink without being formally erased. Eknath Shinde’s rebellion split Uddhav Thackeray’s Shiv Sena, with rebel MLAs reportedly flown out of Maharashtra and housed in a five-star hotel in Guwahati before the government collapsed. Just imagine the story frame by frame: elected representatives disappearing from the state, protected by distance and luxury, while a ruling coalition unravelled in Mumbai.
In 2023, Ajit Pawar’s breakaway produced a similar rupture within Sharad Pawar’s NCP. By joining the BJP-backed Shinde government and taking the deputy chief minister’s post, he turned another pillar of the anti-BJP alliance into part of the ruling camp.
There are many more stories as fascinating as films.
The Architecture of Unequal Combat
The BJP’s dominance rests on more than electoral popularity. It draws strength from organisation, financial muscle, welfare delivery, media amplification, leadership projection, and a disciplined national narrative. Critics also point to a coercive layer: the use of investigative agencies, tax authorities, and regulatory processes that keep opposition leaders under pressure.
India’s danger is not that the opposition will vanish overnight. It is that elections may continue without equal competition, leaving power so insulated that it no longer needs to fear its rivals.
The concern is not that every corruption case is fabricated; many may have legal merit. The concern is the pattern. An investigation by The Indian Express found that since 2014, 25 opposition politicians facing corruption probes crossed over to the BJP, including leaders from Congress, NCP, Shiv Sena, TMC, TDP, SP, and YSRCP. In 23 cases, the switch was followed by reprieve: three cases were closed, while 20 others stalled or went into cold storage. This “washing machine” effect has deepened the perception that opposition leaders are fighting not only elections, but also the pressure of the state.
Meanwhile, opposition figures such as Arvind Kejriwal, Manish Sisodia, and Hemant Soren faced high-profile cases without being convicted. Together, these examples fuel the perception that opposition parties are not fighting only the BJP electorally, but also the wider machinery of the state.
This unequal combat is reinforced at the level of public narrative. Religion, nationalism, and the Pakistan, Bangladesh, or migration cards can turn state contests into battles over nationhood and belonging. At the same time, free rations, cash transfers, and housing schemes are projected not as routine welfare, but as personalised care from the leadership.
The result is a potent system: welfare for reassurance, identity for mobilisation, organisation for execution, and media for narrative control. This is the system the opposition now confronts.
Why the Opposition Struggles to Rebuild
An honest reading must also confront the opposition’s failures. The BJP’s rise is not only the story of its strength; it is also the story of opposition decay. The Congress is a classic case of how a historically people-centric political party can lose ground when its national footprint shrinks and its organisational depth weakens across states.
Several regional parties face similar vulnerabilities. Many depend too heavily on families or single leaders. Internal democracy is weak, second-line leadership is thin, and booth-level organisation often cannot match the BJP’s machinery. These weaknesses make them easier to defeat, divide, or absorb.
This decline is already visible in India’s changing electoral map. Kerala, Tamil Nadu, Punjab, and parts of southern India continue to resist BJP expansion, while Karnataka and Telangana remain fiercely competitive. Yet even these spaces are becoming increasingly vulnerable as the ruling party uses its national dominance to absorb rivals, encourage defections, and shrink the territorial influence of regional parties.
Indian democracy may be drifting towards a one-party show, where the opposition still exists on paper, but power increasingly revolves around a single political machine.
The One-Party Warning
The central question for Indian politics is no longer simply whether Prime Minister Narendra Modi or the BJP can be defeated in a single election cycle. The deeper concern is whether the opposition will retain enough structural space to survive and rebuild at all. Alliances and grassroots organisation matter, but they may prove insufficient if the wider political ecosystem continues to reward defections, absorb rivals, and weaken regional power centres.
India’s danger is not that the opposition will vanish overnight. It is that elections may continue without equal competition, leaving power so insulated that it no longer needs to fear its rivals. Democracy weakens not only when opposition parties are banned, but also when they are kept legally alive while being stripped of the space to compete.
That is why an “opposition-free India” should be read not as an exaggeration, but as a warning. India is not yet a one-party country. But as regional parties lose space, Congress weakens, rivals are absorbed, and the BJP expands state by state, the concern becomes harder to dismiss.
Indian democracy may be drifting towards a one-party show, where the opposition still exists on paper, but power increasingly revolves around a single political machine.
Badrul Hassan is a development and humanitarian professional. He can be reached at [email protected]
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