6 min readApr 29, 2026 06:20 AM IST First published on: Apr 29, 2026 at 06:20 AM ISTIt is perhaps no secret that the BJP’s plan for India is not just a Congress-mukt Bharat, but a Vipaksha Viheen Bharat. The recent defection of seven Members of Parliament from the AAP is part of a long chain of extra-electoral measures the BJP has taken to defang any Opposition party that might even slightly challenge it. At one level, it is hard to grudge any political party wanting to acquire and consolidate power. That is one of the core aims of politics. It is also a rule of politics that no one “deserves” power: Power is what you can create. Any serious political party must take this aspiration seriously.The BJP also has revolutionary aims: Reordering the entire constitutional order through the use of current instruments of state. It is inherent in the logic of a party that wants far-reaching constitutional changes that it seeks to command all the legislative power to do so. The play for the Rajya Sabha is hugely consequential. It also, like all dominant parties, wants all social conflicts to be mediated within the party rather than between parties. As a party, it also wants to dominate all non-electoral institutions, from capital to civil society, so that there are fewer countervailing sources of power left in society. To criticise the BJP for seeking total power, as if it were a normal political party in a pluralist competitive system, is to misunderstand its nature: Its version of national change requires unchecked authority.AdvertisementIt is the case that if large sections of the Opposition are opportunistic or cowardly or both, in some fundamental ways, the joke is on them. But usually in a democracy, opportunism can counteract opportunism, provided there is some symmetry. It may be morally unsavoury but a rotating opportunism at least preserves a balance of power. But now we cannot rely on a wide distribution of opportunism to contain the BJP’s power, precisely because it is one-sided, for a variety of reasons. The prospects of hugely significant defections from the BJP are low. This is so for a variety of reasons. A dominant party will often generate much more of a bandwagon than Opposition parties.A ruling party has many more extra electoral incentives at its disposal, from threatening to use state power in the form of the Enforcement Directorate or income tax, or from dangling other incentives. Admittedly, not all of the BJP’s strategies are entirely unprecedented. But the ruthlessness, scale, coordination and ferocity with which they are deployed is unprecedented. The lack of countervailing institutions means that no one can rely on the judiciary to protect them, or even the press to mobilise the court of public opinion. In that sense, the BJP has made everyone vulnerable.But some of the reasons for this domination are ideological in two senses. On the one hand, the core of the right wing seems to have more conviction about its politics and is less ready to abandon it. On the other hand, these defections remind us that the BJP’s greatest success is not just electoral. It is to lower the ideological barriers to its acceptability so that virtually 90 per cent of politicians are capable of joining it. There are no ideological red lines, let alone restraints of self-respect. The naked success of strategies of inducing fear on the one hand, or rewarding opportunism on the other, also serves the BJP’s ideological agenda in a deeper sense. It not only exposes the shallowness of the potential opposition to the BJP; it deepens cynicism about the politics.AdvertisementThe biggest tragedy of the breakup of the AAP is not the breakup itself; these things happen in politics. But it is the idea that any new force will now operate under a much larger shadow of scepticism. Cynicism, then, creates a kind of political nihilism: The only god to be worshipped is power, and we can appease ourselves by saying we are doing this for the nation. Everything is easier to instrumentalise if it is cloaked in the service of nationalism. If nationalism is the last refuge of the scoundrel, the more scoundrels there are, the more propitious the ground for nationalism.you may likeWe must not let the casual claim that India is too complex for one party to dominate induce a kind of complacency. Sure, there are regional complexities, and the BJP will also make mistakes. But the BJP has already massively moved the bar on just how pervasive a political control and ideological dominance a party can exercise, hollowing out everything else to the point where only its shell remains. It has to be said that a lot of this is the consequence of sheer will: The relentless hunger, ruthlessness, energy, grit, and wanting to win at all costs. The sensibility of the BJP is still hard to match for any other party. The hopes that a sense of existential crisis might energise the Opposition have been dashed.The late Abid Hussain used to joke that one should never say “Reform or Perish” to an Indian politician: They might treat that as a genuine choice. This might even be more apt for an Opposition where even existential stakes cannot get them to summon a will to fight. Depending on the state elections, there may still be pockets of regional resistance. But ironically, those pockets, whether in the TMC, which is struggling, or the DMK, are not going to be able to stem the BJP’s ideological tide.We now have to think of two implications. The first is that the new levels of institutional ruthlessness the BJP has shown suggest that the fairness of competition is going to deteriorate further. All significant sources of countervailing power are vanishing, and finally, we may be looking at a world without the Opposition. But we also know that a society on the surface united by too dominant a force is also likely to be more brittle. We will now know what discontent is about to hit us.The writer is contributing editor, The Indian Express