Two years ago, Narendra Modi looked finished. India's prime minister had led his Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) into the 2024 national election expecting a third straight parliamentary majority — and walked away without one. The BJP fell to 240 seats, forcing Modi to govern through a coalition for the first time in a decade. Opposition leaders called it a tectonic shift. Pundits drafted his political obituary.
They drafted it too soon. In May 2026, the BJP wrested control of West Bengal, an opposition fortress of roughly 100 million people that the party had never governed. The result ended the long reign of Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee — once seen as Modi's most formidable national rival — and the BJP now governs 22 of India's 36 states and union territories, a level of single-party dominance not seen in decades. Allies inside the party are already preparing for Modi to seek a fourth term in 2029.
How did this happen? Analysts point to a distinctive blend of three strategies working in concert. First, Modi has aggressively promoted Hindu nationalism — an ideology that centres Hindu identity in Indian public life. Critics warn the project edges into hostility toward the country's roughly 200 million Muslims; supporters describe it as overdue cultural confidence. In Bengal and neighbouring Assam, the BJP fused that ideology with border anxiety, campaigning hard against alleged infiltrators from Bangladesh. The framing turned an immigration debate into a referendum on who counts as authentically Indian.
The second strategy is welfare. The BJP has poured resources into direct-benefit programs — cooking gas connections, housing, cash transfers, sanitation — that reach voters who never felt seen by previous governments. The third, and most controversial, is electoral machinery. Ahead of the Bengal vote, a Special Intensive Revision of voter rolls removed roughly nine million names — about twelve per cent of the state's electorate. The BJP called it a cleanup of bogus entries and illegal migrants. The opposition called it disenfranchisement of legitimate voters and fought it in court.
But here's the catch: none of these tools alone explains the comeback. Welfare without ideology might have produced a competent but unloved party. Ideology without welfare might have alienated India's huge population of low-income voters. And neither, by themselves, would have flipped a state where the BJP had no historical roots. The combination is what makes the project formidable — and what makes the opposition's path back so unclear. Mamata Banerjee's Trinamool Congress had ruled Bengal for fifteen years; anti-incumbency was real, jobs were scarce, and the BJP arrived with a message tailored to every fault line.
The deeper question is what kind of democracy India is becoming. Long stretches of single-party dominance are rare in functioning democracies but not unheard of — Japan's Liberal Democratic Party ran the country for most of the post-war era, and Mexico's PRI did the same for seven decades. Whether India follows that pattern depends on three things: whether opposition parties can finally unite into a credible alternative, whether courts continue to scrutinise contested voter-roll revisions, and whether economic growth keeps delivering jobs for the millions of young Indians entering the workforce each year. If growth slows, the identity-politics engine has to work harder to compensate — and that is precisely the moment when democracies are most stress-tested. For now, Modi's bet is that the combination he has built can outrun any of those pressures. The Bengal result suggests, at minimum, that the bet is paying off.
Two years ago, pundits wrote Narendra Modi's political obituary. This week his party stormed West Bengal — an opposition fortress it had never cracked — and suddenly a fourth term in 2029 looks plausible.
In 2024, Modi's Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) was supposed to cruise to a third straight parliamentary majority. Instead it fell to 240 seats, forcing Modi into a coalition government for the first time in a decade. Opponents called it a 'tectonic shift' and started writing his political eulogy.
Then came May 2026. The BJP toppled Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee in West Bengal — a state of roughly 100 million people the party had never governed — and won big in neighbouring Assam too. The BJP now runs 22 of India's 36 states and union territories, a level of single-party dominance India hasn't seen in decades.
Modi's comeback isn't one move — it's a layered strategy that mixes ideology, identity, and pocketbook politics. Two parallels help:
India is the world's most populous democracy and a swing player between the US, China, and Russia. Whoever runs Delhi shapes global supply chains, climate policy, and the tech labour market your future employer probably depends on. If you're considering a career in tech, manufacturing, or international relations, the durability of Modi's coalition is one of the most consequential variables of the next decade.
India is drifting toward something rarer in democracies: long-running single-party dominance, like Japan's LDP or Mexico's old PRI. Watch three things: whether opposition parties can finally unite into a credible alternative, whether courts push back on voter-roll changes, and whether economic growth keeps delivering jobs for the millions of young Indians entering the workforce each year. If growth stalls, the identity-politics engine has to work overtime — and that's when democracies get tested.