Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) is at the peak of political influence today. Between now and 2024, it has gained new ground in states where it was either a junior partner in the coalition or was never in power. Its opponents are divided, defeated and facing defections. Where does BJP and Indian politics go from here?
Many commentators see the current dominance of the BJP as a hollowing out of democracy and institutional security in India. At the risk of being unkind, they suffer from Srinath Raghavan calls into itself Book “Each generation has the illusion that its own problems are uniquely oppressive”. Those who feel offended by a historian’s brief polemic would do well to read Milan Vaishnav 2025 paperWhich argues that “referee institutions” have never really asserted themselves in India when there is a strong political executive. Of course, Vaishnav says there are other differences between the current era of BJP dominance and when the Congress held sway.
As far as historically rooted political commentary is concerned, the point is not to declare a democratic May Day in India, but to ask what will happen next? To answer this question, the dynamics within the BJP need to be looked at more carefully than the activities of the opposition. Often, the opposition is busy shooting itself in the foot.
Unlike the Congress, the BJP, the only other party to be dominant at the national level in India, has made its fortunes along with the maturity and intensity of electoral competition in India. The Congress started out with a hegemonic position thanks to its leadership in the independence movement – ​​but its leadership was not exactly socially representative because universal suffrage and its egalitarian influence on politics did not exist before independence. Congress gradually lost the advantage that OBC farmers were getting, mainly due to the political tide in the middle of Indian economy and society.
Certainly, national dominance did not come easily or quickly for the BJP or its ideological parent, the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS). This project began with the Bharatiya Jana Sangh (BJS), which had limited success in the 1950s and 1960s. It made a smart move by merging with the Janata Party to share power at the Center after the Emergency. This was followed by a leap of faith (pun intended), induced secession, to pursue a hardline Hindutva agenda in the Ram Mandir movement, which made the BJP the number two party in the country. After this, the Hindutva agenda was again added to form an alliance with smaller parties and form the central government under the leadership of Atal Bihari Vajpayee between 1998 and 2004. The 2004 defeat was followed by a prolonged period of political turmoil, with the BJP barely able to save its traditional bases. Business as usual would have done nothing to stop the BJP’s political losses. This happened when Narendra Modi was in BJP. Contrary to what many of his critics see, there is more to Modi’s political strategy than radical Hindutva. Three major points can be listed.
First, to reach power in Gujarat, the BJP had to face the strong KHAM (Koli-Dalit-Tribal-Muslim) social alliance of the Congress in the state. Gujarat BJP and its organic soldier Modi understood, Hindutva as an electoral strategy was not effective unless it was weaponized adequately to address social fault lines on the ground by uniting all other Hindus politically rather than chasing the utopia of achieving all Hindus. This strategy, beyond the BJP’s success in Gujarat, was most important for the BJP in winning Uttar Pradesh in 2014 and 2017, paving the way for a repeat of the 2019 national victory, confirming its status as the new political giant.
Second, Modi, who has been the Chief Minister of Gujarat since 2002, a significant beneficiary of economic reforms in terms of capital accumulation, also understood the importance of luring capital beyond the state’s borders. This not only helped eliminate the need for give-and-take for political finance, but also created a pro-market appeal that could win support among the managerial elite as well as big business. The 2014 campaign on the Gujarat model was exactly the same. This took the BJP’s appeal decisively beyond the communal but majority Hindutva constituency that it had cultivated as its core Brahmin-Baniya base during the days of the Ram Mandir movement and the Jan Sangh.
Three, in the minds of Modi and his party, hegemony is not something that can be secured once acquired. It must be consistently exercised on a large number of people, institutions, opponents and even allies within and outside the Party. The BJP under Modi has not only perfected the drip-irrigation model of political Hindutva on a sustained basis, but has also belittled opponents, allies and even comrades within the party. Without taking names, it is safe to say that many of Modi’s cronies today are the political bonsai equivalent. The next generation of leadership consists of leaders who serve at the will of top executives or who are often made aware of the hierarchy from time to time.
Take Modi out of the picture – the most popular BJP leader outside the party and the most powerful inside it – and the entire system could be tested. What will happen when Modi is no longer leading the BJP juggernaut? This question will present itself, if not in 2029, then certainly in 2034, when he will be 84.
It would be useful to go back into history once again. There is only one example of what can be described as a proper transition of power to a hegemonic party in India. From Jawaharlal Nehru to Indira Gandhi. Lal Bahadur Shastri’s tenure was cut short due to his death. In contrast to today’s ideas about dynastic politics and the transfer of power to succession model, Indira had to fight for her authority. The reason was simple. Congress was not just his father’s party, even though his father was its biggest leader.
This is where Raghavan’s book can offer more than a brief polemic to the interested reader: a fascinating historical account of the rise of Indira Gandhi, what he rightly calls the first example of political Caesarism in India. Indira Gandhi’s Caesarism was not just spiritual. This required a new political economy that sought to address the failure of the original post-independence economic transformation model through fiscal (things like bank nationalization that eased government spending constraints) and welfare (anti-poverty programs) pipelines. Faced with an adverse economic environment, all these tactics put together were not enough to convince Indira of the democratic sanctity of her rule, which she had suspended on this day 51 years ago. This column was written on June 25.
The Modi era is not much different in terms of czarism and economic relief. Post-liberalisation, the Indian state has added external account plumbing to the fiscal plumbing toolkit learned during the reign of the Indira government. Of course, the political rhetoric has shifted from socialism to cultural nationalism. India has increased its economic potential compared to the 1970s. External economic shocks trouble it, but they have not crippled it the way they would have done a few decades ago. External account plumbing has helped here. But there is one important difference between the political practices of Indira Gandhi and Modi: Indira Gandhi’s decision to make the party a purely dynastic affair.
The promotion of Sanjay and (coincidentally) Rajiv Gandhi in the Congress hierarchy destroyed the grand old party. Dynasty and political allegiance became a useful option to cover the naked pursuit of power by all means, even if the core politics of the Congress was compromised. What emerged from this transformation was a party that was a club with vested interests out to capture power rather than an ideological political machine like the Congress of the independence struggle days.
BJP is facing the opposite pole of this situation. Political rise in today’s BJP requires complete reconciliation with the dominant worldview. A character like Atal Bihari Vajpayee would feel out of place as well as irrelevant in today’s BJP.
However, behind this ideological coherence lie hidden ambitions and resentments. There is no dynastic formula for deciding succession based on what matters most. more in party organization by law instead In fact Control. Given the experience so far of non-partisans, even opponents, being made chief ministers in important states like West Bengal, Bihar and Assam, the opinion of ideological parents in deciding the leadership seems either very pragmatic or remarkably passive. Any one of these means weakening the political core. The late Arun Jaitley, perhaps one of the most politically astute Indian politicians and a key architect of the current BJP, in one of his appearances at the Hindustan Times Leadership Summit talked about the rise of “career nationalists” in the BJP. All these factors make the question of succession in the BJP acute without succumbing to conspiracy theories. None of this means that the succession fight will necessarily lead to political upsets for the BJP. This is for two reasons.
One, the decline of the Congress was due to its inability to keep pace with the OBC tide in Indian politics, which required nothing less than a massive purge of the existing leadership in the states. BJP was born in this troubled environment and has mastered the question of social engineering since its inception. By keeping Muslims out of its electoral calculations, the BJP can always be more socially representative as far as Hindus are concerned. Two, electoral politics in India is extremely expensive and it would be extremely difficult to sustain itself materially to challenge the dominant system at the grassroots level. BJP is miles ahead of even the current opposition, leave alone any new entrant.
But this also does not give any guarantee happily ever after State for BJP. Economic challenges, more structural than cyclical, will test voters’ patience and the effectiveness of the BJP’s palliative engineering in the days to come. The challenge will coincide with the conclusion of the succession question within the party. Indian politics, at this point, has become a four-way road to the Rome playbook, with the BJP being the proverbial Rome. Could a prophet have warned these Romans about the Ides of March?
(Roshan Kishore, HT’s data and political economy editor, writes a weekly column on the state of the country’s economy and its political fallout, and vice versa)
