It took him 12 years, but Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi has finally brought the world’s most-populous nation to the precipice of an all-powerful, one-party state.
He isn’t the first to try. In 1971, Indira Gandhi led her party to a landslide victory, only to have her own election challenged for malpractices. When the judiciary stripped her of her parliamentary seat in 1975, she didn’t step down. Instead, she declared a national emergency, suspended civil liberties, and forced constitutional changes through a hollowed-out parliament while opposition leaders languished in jail.
Yet, even Gandhi’s iron grip slipped; within two years, she succumbed to democratic pressure and called fresh elections that eventually ousted her as prime minister.
In the 21st century, such heavy-handedness is obsolete. As Monday’s poll results from Indian states suggest, there are quieter, more efficient ways for a central power to crush regional defiance. By wielding the full weight of federal institutions — most notably the nominally independent Election Commission — Modi has achieved what was once thought impossible. His Bharatiya Janata Party has successfully breached the fortress of West Bengal, a domain guarded for 15 years by Mamata Banerjee, a feisty adversary.
Known as the street-fighting “Didi,” or elder sister, Banerjee had turned this crucial state on India’s eastern frontier into a personal bastion of grassroots populism. Yet her long-standing popularity and her Trinamool Congress’s hegemony over the distribution of welfare programs have finally been dismantled. According to the last update on the Election Commission’s website, the BJP has won 206 seats in the 294-member assembly, an overwhelming majority. “Change has happened in Bengal,” Modi said in a victory speech at his party’s headquarters in New Delhi.
Change has also happened elsewhere. In Tamil Nadu, voters chose the popular actor Vijay (who goes by just one name) to lead them, disrupting the decades-old duopoly of the region’s two main parties.
More than the outcome, it is the process in West Bengal that has astounded observers. Just months before the ballot, roughly nine million electors — 12% of the state’s total — were struck off the rolls in what the Election Commission termed a “purification” exercise. Although amendments to the rolls aren’t a novelty, the scale and timing of the so-called special intensive revision were unprecedented.
While the process began with the summary removal of 6.4 million names by February, the most controversial blow came in the final weeks of the campaign. An additional 2.7 million voters — the remainder of the 9 million total — were flagged for demographic or mathematical impossibilities in their data — cases where the software detected impossible age gaps between parents and children or deemed family sizes to be improbably large.
Even as the commission defended this as a scientific necessity, the impact was chillingly targeted. Independent data from minority-heavy regions showed deletion rates significantly higher than the average. In a state where political identity long coalesced around Bengali language and culture rather than faith, this exercise effectively imported the north Indian model of religious polarization by administrative fiat.
Such a blatant abrogation of individual voting rights is a first in the Indian republic’s 76-year history. Banerjee found herself fighting not just a political rival, but a federal machinery that had narrowed her path to victory before the first vote was cast. In the BJP’s telling, this was merely a cleanup of illegal immigration from neighboring Bangladesh that she had been benefiting from. To the TMC, it was a surgical strike on its electorate.
This is when Banerjee was already on shaky ground, and Modi — widely believed to have been weakened by his party’s loss of parliamentary majority in the 2024 general elections — was resurgent, winning a string of controversial victories, such as Haryana in the north and Maharashtra in the west. After 27 years in the wilderness, the BJP finally recaptured power from the Aam Aadmi Party in Delhi state, home to the national capital.
The politics of consolidating the Hindu vote has worked exceptionally well for Modi in the north and west, practically obliterating the secular space once occupied by the Congress Party, the main national opposition. (On Monday, the Congress managed to return to power in southwestern Kerala, unseating the Left after a decade. But there was nothing remarkable about that — it was merely the state’s famous revolving door swinging back. The BJP retaining control of the tea-producing northeastern state of Assam wasn’t a surprise, either.)
West Bengal was always different. Although cleaved into two halves by the 1947 partition of the subcontinent along communal lines, the state refused to align around religion. The communist parties that ruled for 34 years subsumed sectarian differences under the umbrella of class struggle. Banerjee continued this, substituting class for development and welfare. But without New Delhi’s support, and facing serious allegations of corruption and misgovernance by local officials and party cadre, her moat proved vulnerable to the BJP’s institutional raid.
The implications of this result reach far and wide. Global investors and India’s partners in multilateral groupings like the Quad would like to know if the country’s emergent political configuration will be a Chinese-style party-state: muscular, decisive and purposeful. Or if it’s a temporary band-aid on a nation too diverse to be represented by a single leader and a single political agenda.
Southern Indian states like Tamil Nadu and Kerala are paying close attention. They have held out against northern linguistic hegemony and the ideology of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, the BJP’s ideological fountainhead. The RSS is a century-old organization dedicated to a Hindu nation, and it plays a long game.
As the south anxiously waits for a reorganization of parliament that will dim its political voice, the warning from West Bengal remains: If future elections must be fought against the institutional sway of New Delhi rather than a mere political party, even industrial powerhouses like Tamil Nadu may find it impossible to preserve their multi-religious, secular identities.
Modi’s biggest centenary gift to the RSS is to present it with a country that — at least in the north, west, and now the east — is a functional, single-party reality. In this new India, either the opposition is erased from the picture, or their voters are. Indira Gandhi’s emergency was a temporary fever. It’s too early to say whether what follows is a deeper malaise.
This column reflects the personal views of the author and does not necessarily reflect the opinion of the editorial board or Bloomberg LP and its owners.
Andy Mukherjee is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist covering industrial companies and financial services in Asia. Previously, he worked for Reuters, the Straits Times and Bloomberg News.
Disclaimer: This report is auto generated from the Bloomberg news service. ThePrint holds no responsibility for its content.
Also read: How Team BJP broke Mamata’s Bengal fortress