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www.desitalk.com – that’s all you need to know 18 SPECIAL REPORT ˨ INDIA May 15, 2026 Narendra Modi Keeps Running Circles Around His Critics F or years, Western liberals and India’s opposition have both consoled themselves with a theory: Prime Minister Narendra Modi is an authoritar- ian, India’s overwhelming diversity is ultimately incompatible with strongman rule and thus his illiberalism will naturally backfire. That theory met perhaps its largest setback yet on Monday, when Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party - the largest political party in history - captured one of the states that should have been most impossible for it to appeal to: a fiercely independent, culturally distinct region home to more people than California, Texas and NewYork combined. The opposition would do well to try to learn from its latest loss. Monday’s vote did more than flip a state. For decades, India’s most powerful regional parties have been the most resilient limit on the BJP’s national expansion - locally rooted political machines, fluent in their states’ language and identity, that the BJP’s predominantly northern, Hindi- speaking culture often struggled to pen- etrate. West Bengal’s Trinamool Congress, led by the formidable Mamata Banerjee, was among the most prominent of them, lending credibility to the idea that India’s pluralism is simply too expansive for any one party to knit together - much less one pushing for a specific, muscular vision of cultural nationalism. In routing Banerjee on Monday, the BJP demonstrated it can now break the regional and cultural barri- ers that were supposed to contain it. Even before this win, the numbers behind the BJP’s ascent were already staggering. The BJP boasts 140 million members, more than any political party on Earth, exceeding the Chinese Commu- nist Party - its only peer - by 40 percent. More votes have been cast for Modi than for any politician in human history, by a margin in the hundreds of millions. Modi has comfortably outperformed every other democratically elected leader in the world in Morning Consult’s global leader approval tracker for many years, despite the longevity of his tenure. By the metrics that translate to power in a democracy, the Hindu right is already the contemporary world’s most successful political move- ment. Critics counter - not without reason - that electoral successes are not the only way to mea- sure democratic strength, and that the BJP and the broader Hindu nationalist movement have eroded India’s liberal institutions, press freedoms and pluralist social fabric, with minorities facing rising violence and discrimination under its rule. They further claim the ballots are not all that they appear, and accuse the BJP of tilting the playing field - stacking the election com- mission and engineering a now-defunct dona- tion scheme that gave the party steep financial advantages over its rivals. TheWest Bengal vote drew its own controversy after the election com- mission purged about 9 million names, roughly 12 percent of the electorate, from the voting rolls - a move supporters defended as removing duplicate, ineligible or deceased voters, and that critics decried as a weapon to disenfranchise the Muslimminority that votes predominantly for the opposition. But electoral engineering alone cannot account for the BJP’s successes. The party took more than two-thirds ofWest Bengal’s seats on Monday, and in less than 50 years has gone from a fringe outfit to leading 21 states - while the Indian National Congress, the party that led India to independence, has been reduced to four holdouts. The contrast with its principal rival is instruc- tive. The Congress party inherited its dominance: It spearheaded the independence movement, won the buy-in of India’s English-speaking elite and built the institutions of the state it would govern for most of the country’s first half-century, animated by fashion- able international ideas about how to manage society. The BJP built its dominance the hard way - from the ground up through decades of grassroots organiz- ing, painstakingly melding together a coalition that now spans castes, languages, regions and religious traditions that have otherwise had little reason to vote together. Its foundation is the Sangh Parivar or “organization family,” of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), a controversial Hindu nationalist volunteer organiza- tion, now a century old, focused on cultivating millions of cadres and dozens of organizations devoted to reviving its vision of Hindu society. In concert with the BJP, the RSS spreads its message through a network of other organizations it founded alongside the BJP: India’s largest labor union, largest private school network, largest student union and the most influential council of Hindu religious leadership, to name but a few. That unique set of on-the-ground, ideological and social ties across Indian so- ciety, combined with hard-nosed dealmak- ing and shrewd alliance building, has been the foundation of the BJP’s extraordinary rise. The BJP is consolidating power just as India takes its place among the world’s great powers: largest by population, sec- ond-largest by military personnel, on the way to becoming third-largest by economy, and the only nation with the potential to counterbalance China in Asia. Monday’s victory inWest Bengal shows that the BJP’s rise has not yet reached its ceiling. The BJP’s opponents may keep waiting for the reckoning they’ve long predicted. It may yet arrive. But anyone watching the evidence should instead prepare for the India of the coming decades - and the balance of power in Asia - to be built in no small part by the Hindu right. -Special to TheWashington Post India’s Prime Minister Narendra Modi greets his supporters as he arrives at the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) headquarters as the BJP won the Assam state assembly election and was on course to win West Bengal, in New Delhi, India, May 4, 2026. PHOTO:REUTERS/ADNAN ABIDI/FILE PHOTO By Bill Drexel India’s ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) supporters celebrate as early trends show their party leading in the West Bengal state assembly election results, outside the party’s regional office in Kolkata, India, May 4, 2026. Security personnel stand guard during vote counting of the West Bengal state legislative assembly elections inside a counting centre in Kolkata, India May 4, 2026. Members of security forces stop vehicles as they stand guard along a road leading to the site where an aide of Suvendu Adhikari, a leader of Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) in West Bengal state, was shot dead days after the BJP secured a majority in the state assembly elections, in North 24 Parganas, on the outskirts of Kolkata, India, May 7, 2026. PHOTO: REUTERS/SAHIBA CHAWDHARY PHOTO:REUTERS/SAHIBA CHAWDHARY PHOTO:REUTERS/SAHIBA CHAWDHARY