The Opposition India Never Had - And the Democracy It Is Losing

By Harikrishnan S.

For a decade now, India has lived inside a carefully curated illusion.  The Hindu-right-wing BJP government, run by the Nerendra Modi-Amit Shah duopoly, has mastered the art of perception management so thoroughly that governance itself has become secondary.  Policy failures, economic shocks, communal ruptures, and flagrant institutional capture have all been airbrushed into one seamless narrative of “strong leadership” and “unprecedented growth.”  And, sadly, the truly calamitous part in this drama is not merely that a ruling party built its empire on half-truths, doctored numbers, and managed outrage.  The real tragedy here is that there has been no serious opposition to challenge this spectacle, no counter-vision, and certainly no counter-force capable of disrupting this machine in any way.  The past ten years are a case study in what happens when a ruling party with authoritarian instincts meets an opposition that suffers from a chronic inability to read the moment.  The BJP, with its bottomless resources, ruthless discipline, and single-point narrative engineering, has run circles around a Congress party still trapped in the inertia of its own past.  And at the centre of this drift stands Rahul Gandhi, a political leader who has mastered the art of losing.

To call Rahul a failure is almost too kind; he has been virtually a non-factor in the very space he claims to lead.  Politics, whether we like it or not, is ultimately judged by its hard outcomes – votes, seats and mandates.  And, on every measurable front, he has led the Congress to humiliation after humiliation.  Three consecutive general election defeats, a shrinking presence in state assemblies, and the erosion of its traditional voter base to the point where it cannot win even where it once reigned effortlessly.  Any other political party in the world would have changed its leadership after such an unbroken streak of sheer disaster.  Not the Congress!  They continue to treat the Gandhis as irreplaceable while the country moves on without them… and move on it has.

Ironically, the defining demographic that turned against the Congress is the very one created by its own economic reforms.  The new middle class that rose after the 1991 liberalisation (a self-made generation that built careers, businesses, and assets without the patronage of the old order) ostensibly loathes entitlement.  And nothing reeks of entitlement quite like the Congress high command - a party that still behaves like a sovereign family trust rather than a political institution.  The BJP, to its credit, has understood this psyche perfectly.  Narendra Modi’s carefully peddled “chaiwala-to-PM” mythology - regardless of how embroidered or outright fictitious it is - strikes a deep chord with this aspirational class.  In a quite perverse way, even his flawed English, his iffy educational background, and his rougher edges only strengthen the narrative that he is “one of us,” fighting the polished elites.  Against this emotional theatre, Rahul Gandhi, a leader whose privilege and political detachment have made him increasingly irrelevant to the electorate, feels almost like a relic from a past era.

But electoral psychology alone does not explain the BJP’s dominance.  What actually makes this decade particularly alarming is the sheer scale and sophistication of the perception machinery that props up this government.  From social media ecosystems and TV channels repurposed into propaganda arms, to a bureaucracy explicitly instructed to maintain “one government, one narrative,” this is a regime that has rebuilt the very architecture of political communication.  In parallel, hard numbers have been bent to fit political needs.  Even the latest growth figures, touted by the government as proof of India’s economic ascendancy, are now being questioned by those who once shaped or monitored this very system.  The IMF’s recent C-grade for India’s national accounts, echoed by economists like Arvind Subramanian, Pronab Sen, and Arun Kumar, underscores a more unsettling truth: that the numbers themselves may have been bent so far out of shape that they no longer resemble the economy they claim to measure.  GDP series was revised to cut down UPA-era growth and inflate NDA’s. Unemployment surveys were buried or delayed when they showed the worst joblessness in 45 years.  Consumption expenditure data that showed fall in real consumption for the first time in decades was scrapped altogether.  Even now, suspiciously low GDP deflators are flattering real growth figures.  The pattern is unmistakable; the scoreboard has been rewritten to suit the player!

Add to this the relentless stoking of sectarian divisions, blatant weaponising of Hindu-Muslim fault lines, turning religious identity into a political currency, and you get the sharpest image of why Narendra Modi continues to command loyalty despite policy disasters that would have sunk any other government.  For a distressingly large section of Indians, Modi’s most persuasive qualification has been that he is perceived as the leader who has “shown Muslims their place.”   No amount of economic data or moral reasoning competes with that kind of communal gratification.

This political vacuum has not only enabled the BJP’s dominance; it has deepened the vulnerabilities of those already living on the margins, from Muslims targeted by hate campaigns to activists imprisoned under draconian laws.  The absence of an effective opposition has left millions without an institutional shield.

The Congress, as the primary opposition party, has been the weakest link in India’s democratic chain.  There has been no coherent ideological alternative, no compelling leadership, no strategic vision, and indeed no message discipline.  Instead of reinventing itself for a new India, the party has clung on to outdated hierarchies and ignored the lessons of its own decline.  The recent Bihar elections underline this dysfunction.  Even within a fragile opposition alliance, the Congress fielded candidates against INDIA bloc. partners in more than 10 constituencies, sabotaging its own coalition.  This is not a party with a plan; this is a party with a death wish.  And yet, because of the Congress’s legacy and reach, its failures do not remain confined to itself.  Its inertia drags down the entire opposition ecosystem.  It is the deadweight that prevents a credible anti-BJP front from emerging.  India does not merely suffer from a strong ruling party; it suffers from the absence of a viable alternative.  A democracy is only as strong as the forces that can challenge and replace its government.  Today, regrettably, India has the former but lacks the latter.

Meanwhile, India’s institutional landscape, from the Election Commission to universities to investigative agencies, has been quite brazenly refitted to mirror the ruling party’s ideological imagination.  What were once neutral referees of the republic now function like auxiliaries of the regime, their neutrality hollowed out and their constitutional purpose reduced to a stage prop in the larger theatre of power.  India’s democratic indices are falling year after year, placing it alongside flawed democracies and hybrid regimes.  The press is intimidated, dissent is criminalised, and bureaucrats are reminded that loyalty to the “narrative” is more important than loyalty to constitutional principles.  In such an environment, the Congress’s refusal to change its leadership is not merely political incompetence; it is apparent democratic negligence.  A 139-year-old party that once shaped modern India has, to all intents and purposes, degenerated into a millstone around the opposition’s neck; too weak to lead, too entitled to step aside, and too delusional to recognise that Rahul Gandhi’s continued leadership is a liability India can no longer afford.

If the BJP’s decade of dominance is the story of a party that mastered perception, the Congress’s decade of decline is the story of a party that mastered self-delusion.  India is caught between a ruling party that excels at manufacturing myths and an opposition that excels at believing its own.  And until the Congress gathers the courage to break with its dynastic addiction and rebuild itself from the helm downward, the BJP will continue to win, not because of its strength but because of the opposition’s spectacular weakness!

A democracy does not die only when authoritarian leaders rise.  It dies when those who should resist them forget how.

(The author is a National Award winner for Best Narration and an independent political analyst.  He can be reached at hari@healthcombine.com)