NDA’s Bihar victory was phenomenal. You may rack your brain, feel broken, feel anguished, but the truth stands: it is phenomenal to turn a brutal Lok Sabha drubbing into a string of emphatic state victories that requires not just machinery, but mastery. And on that, you will have to hand it to the BJP, more precisely, to Narendra Modi and Amit Shah.
The duo is unstoppable. Maharashtra, Haryana, Delhi, and now Bihar, each taken with an ease that leaves the Opposition gasping for relevance. So comfortably, in fact, that in these assemblies the Opposition almost flickers like a ghost, present in theory, absent in impact.
The strategy is so precise, so layered, that even the criticism starts to bend inward. I received a call yesterday morning, and in a voice thick with exasperation, someone exclaimed: Why didn’t the Opposition just boycott the Bihar elections? What was the point of walking into a storm without shelter, without a strategy, without a story?
Opposition’s deeper crisis
It is cruel, but the sentiment is spreading. The narrative no longer asks, ‘How is the BJP winning so convincingly?’ Instead, a colder frustration is turning toward the Opposition itself: why are they being so staggeringly, repeatedly, bewilderingly inept? The questions that once examined the BJP’s strategy now interrogate the Opposition’s stupidity, probing how they did not see it coming again.
This is where the mood of the country has begun to wobble. It is not just fear. It is not even a full resignation. It is something more corrosive: a sense that the match is over even before the toss. If institutions fail, citizens will falter and then adapt. Outrage will trend for six hours and vanish by dinner. Because the BJP, whether one praises it or resents it, has made electoral dominance look effortless.
And effort, sadly, is exactly what the Opposition has stopped making. Because let’s be clear: this is not just about numbers. It is not even about ideology. It is about the physics of power, which the BJP understands to the bone. The ruling party does not contest elections; they engineer them. They are no longer preparing for seasons; they are writing for eras. And so a darker question enters the room, enters this column unavoidably, what happens to democracy when winning becomes the only language, and the Opposition forgets how to speak at all?
In the last 11 years, the Opposition has not been able to understand that Narendra Modi and Amit Shah love elections. Modi loves them for the optics, for the chants, for the armour of invincibility that victory allows him to wear. Shah loves them differently, quietly, clinically. For him, elections are not performance; they are architecture. If Modi is the myth, Shah is the mathematics, astute, unblinking, unnervingly precise. Precise to the nail and tooth of it. The Opposition, meanwhile, fights elections like seasons. Or, to put it more plainly, against the BJP’s 24×7 political machinery, the Opposition is a pop-up shop.
Look at Bihar. Tejashwi Yadav made considerable noise during the 2024 Lok Sabha campaign. He travelled across districts, tried to re-energise the RJD’s core Yadav-Muslim base, and briefly managed to project himself as the face of a younger, sharper opposition. But once the results came in and the vote-to-seat conversion collapsed, the momentum evaporated. Tejashwi, too.
In the months that followed, his public presence thinned. Political chatter focused less on mobilisation and more on family rifts, brotherly feuds, and organisational drift. He did not become the face of Bihar’s youth, nor the alternative to Nitish Kumar. His absence eroded the party structure, weakened outreach among non-Yadav OBCs, and left the opposition space unguarded.
Then, just before the 2025 Bihar Assembly elections, he re-emerged, almost theatrically, anointing himself as the opposition’s chief ministerial face, returning to Raghopur to defend the family bastion, ramping up rallies, offering fresh promises. But the re-awakening came too late. The drift had done its damage. The BJP-led alliance had already tightened its grip before the campaign truly began.
And that is the Opposition’s deeper crisis: they produce more theatre within their own ranks than against the BJP. Instead of scripting a counter-narrative to Modi’s spectacle, they become their own spectacle. Press conferences turn into confessionals of infighting, egos clash louder than ideologies, and the only consistent storyline is collapse. They do not oppose the ruling party as much as they oppose one another. In a political moment that demands coherence, they offer choreography.
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Deficit of imagination
While the BJP holds power, the Opposition is busy imploding. They are overflowing with leaders but starving for leadership. Too many claimants to the throne, too few capable of holding a vision longer than a press conference cycle. In the end, they are not the Opposition to the government; they are the Opposition to the Opposition. And the audience, exhausted, leaves before the play even ends.
Which is why this moment is not only about what the BJP has achieved, but what the Opposition has allowed. If 2014 gave hope in Narendra Modi, then for a brief shimmering second in 2024, the Opposition’s cumulative gains gave India a strange new feeling, a hope inside a hope, a political déjà vu but with the possibility of a different ending. A year and a half later, though, that feeling has thinned. And perhaps that is why the BJP’s win reads phenomenal this time. Not because the result surprises us, but because nothing and no one stood in its way. Because there was no counter-idea marching alongside it, no rival imagination pounding the pavement, no competing dream arguing for a different India. And that is the real danger.
So yes, it no longer interests me to write about how the BJP stays in power. That story is frightening in its efficiency, but it is also predictable in its logic. The real story is no longer how the BJP keeps winning, but how the Opposition keeps losing. Because a democracy dies not when one side becomes too powerful, but when the other side becomes too inept to even try.
Right now, India is not suffering from a surplus of authoritarianism nearly as much as it is suffering from a deficit of imagination. Power has not silenced the Opposition; the Opposition has surrendered its voice. And today, if the BJP is writing the time, it is only because the Opposition stopped writing at all.
Shruti Vyas is a journalist based in New Delhi. She writes on politics, international relations and current affairs. Views are personal.
(Edited by Ratan Priya)