Modi’s Triumph in West Bengal Elections Puts Him Closer to an Opposition-Free India

When Narendra Modi first campaigned to lead the country, more than a decade ago, he raised the slogan of a “Congress-free India,” plotting the elimination of his only national opposition.

Congress, the founding party of independent India, has since withered. It has hardly recovered from 2014, when its seats in the national Parliament slumped from 206 to just 44 in one election. It lost its grip on state legislatures, too, and now controls only four states, to the 21 held by Mr. Modi’s governing alliance.

Its decline left regional parties across India as the most important counterweight to Mr. Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party and its Hindu nationalist agenda. Their leaders ranged against him in the north, south, east and west. Two of the most charismatic and formidable were Mamata Banerjee, the chief minister of West Bengal since 2011, and M.K. Stalin, who presided over Tamil Nadu since 2021.

This week, with election defeats for both Ms. Banerjee and Mr. Stalin, Mr. Modi finds himself at the helm of an India in which his opponents hold virtually no political power. Congress has held a greater number of seats in Parliament, at points. But more than at any time since democracy was suspended in the 1970s Emergency, Mr. Modi has made India look like a one-leader state.

“The idea of India” formulated by Jawaharlal Nehru, its first prime minister after independence, was the ideal of a political pluralism to match the vast country’s human diversity of religion, language and culture. Nowadays, as India’s surviving smaller parties dwindle away, that dream looks like a quaint loser to the B.J.P.’s 100-year-old vision of an orthodox Hindu nation.