It was just two weeks back that National Interest underlined how the BJP, under Narendra Modi and Amit Shah, was moving India towards a single-party system despite being way short of a Lok Sabha majority.
The theory will be tested in the Monsoon Session beginning Monday. There’s a good chance it will affirm India’s evolution into a one-party state.Of course there will be a flip side to it. It will also open up the possibility for a second party to rise, if it could sweep up the detritus of the vote banks of regional parties the BJP is currently decimating or subsuming.
This incredible win for the BJP will, ironically, also open up the space needed for the Congress to rediscover its mojo as the BJP’s only pan-national challenger.
I know this will draw much scepticism, even derision from both vicious haters and too-often-disappointed lovers of the Congress. But Modi, Shah and the BJP will agree. They understand that the only reasonable challenge to them comes from the Congress. Go back to Modi’s campaign speeches over the years. The party he attacks most is the Congress, the Gandhi family.This pattern is seen even in states where the Congress is a cipher. In Andhra Pradesh he repeatedly said that because of its appeasement policy the Congress boycotted the Ram Mandir consecration.Referring to the recovery of a cash stash in the home of a domestic help of a Congress minister’s aide in Jharkhand, he again asked where all the party had set up its cash warehouses. This was in Andhra too, where the Congress polled only 2.74 percent in the 2024 general election. Again in the same campaign in Odisha (also a blank zone for the Congress) he asked if the Congress “shahzada” (prince) was ‘reading from the same script as 2014’. In Bihar, where the Congress is a junior partner of the Yadav dynasty, he repeatedly targeted it for “appeasement politics”. In West Bengal where the only rival for the BJP was Mamata Banerjee’s TMC, he bundled Congress with her and said the two conspired to block 33 percent reservation for women. Even if it’s a municipal election someplace where the Congress doesn’t exist, you’ll find the BJP targeting it. That’s an acknowledgement that Modi sees the Congress as his only likely challenger. He’s too sharp to dismiss it contemptuously as insignificant.
