On May 4, when it became palpable that the BJP was coming to power in West Bengal, a Kolkata-based journalist-friend sought an online meeting with four other members of the team that runs a Bengali news website, which attracts a minimum of 30,000 visitors every month. Three of the five reside outside Bengal. During the meeting, the journalist-friend suggested they should start winding down their operations.

The journalist-friend explained to me that having watched the BJP neuter mainstream media elsewhere, it was clear that it was only a matter of time before independent journalists were targeted in Bengal. “When the accused in the Bhima Koregaon case couldn’t get bail for years and Umar Khalid and Sharjeel Imam still can’t, despite being represented by India’s best lawyers, I would be forgotten if I were jailed or raided,” he said.

Two months ago, I was in Patna, where I met a Yadav and a Muslim who vote in a village in Ara district. Both said that over cycles of elections their booth would register at least 700 votes for the Rashtriya Janata Dal. In the 2025 Bihar Assembly election, these votes flipped. “It couldn’t have happened without manipulation,” said one. I asked him: “Why didn’t they protest?”

“We would have been beaten or thrown in jail,” they said.

The three accounts echo what’s now a truism: it isn’t just the opposition that’s facing death, but the very idea of opposition is also withering away as the fear of the BJP mounts. Even irrefutable evidence of electoral manipulation doesn’t provoke protests. Unless the opposition enables the people to overcome their fear of the BJP, its winters out of power will only grow longer.

The fear of the BJP has been built through a three-step process. One, the BJP has a penchant for deploying instruments of coercion to suppress dissent. Two, at least the 2024 Lok Sabha election onwards, the party is widely perceived to have acquired state power through electoral manipulation. This has given the BJP an air of invincibility. Three, and more importantly, Hindutva, or the narrative of building a Hindu rashtra, has become the wish of a large segment of the Indian electorate. They are immune to the horror of watching Indian democracy die.

Consider these details: in the 2024 Lok Sabha and Assembly elections, held simultaneously in Odisha, the difference between the votes polled and votes counted ranged from 1 to 908 in 58 Assembly booths (according to Biju Janata Dal’s press note). And this, when the BJD could lay hands on a very limited number of Form 17Cs, which provides the count of votes cast in every booth. The voter turnout was revised upward over two days, ranging from around 7 per cent to over 17 per cent in the State’s 21 Lok Sabha constituencies, and from 8.54 per cent to 30.64 per cent in its 147 Assembly seats.

Two votes in six seconds

Public intellectual Parakala Prabhakar persuasively showed that in Andhra Pradesh, approximately 17.19 lakh people voted between 11.45 pm and 2 am in 3,500 booths for both the Lok Sabha and Assembly elections, which were held simultaneously in 2024. Parakala calculated that every person cast two votes in six seconds, an impossibility. The gains of the BJP-led National Democratic Alliance in Odisha and Andhra Pradesh swept it to power.

Without public anger being expressed over perceived electoral manipulation, the BJP turned the Election Commission of India (ECI) into a customised eraser, for deliberately effacing voters unlikely to vote for it. It was brazen in West Bengal, about which much has been written. It’s a mug’s game to determine the degree to which the Special intensive Revision (SIR) contributed to Mamata Banerjee’s ouster from power.

In a healthy democracy, such evidence of electoral rigging would have led to an outburst of rage. It hasn’t happened in India. One reason is that the parties constituting the opposition are led or populated by second-generation dynasts untrained in the politics of agitations and movements. Lacking the stamina and fortitude to struggle and suffer, their default response has been to petition a body they themselves accuse of electoral manipulation—the ECI. Or appeal to the Supreme Court, which rarely rules against a strong executive, once again reflected in its decision to facilitate the SIR.

But even if they were to overcome their own limitations, they are unlikely to succeed unless they neutralise Hindutva, the alternative to the idea of a secular, plural, multicultural India. It is now India’s largest political constituency, whose members do not consider the establishment of a Hindu rashtra, even through means fair or foul, to be repugnant.

The opposition has tried four methods to wean away supporters of Hindutva. Its leaders play the “devout Hindu” by publicly displaying their reverence for Hinduism. Their religious personae, in contrast to that they sported in the past, seem hypocritical and convince few. Some ceased to speak of the othering of Muslims, hoping to counter allegations of favouring them. But their silence doesn’t impress the Hindutva constituency. A few have pitted caste and regional-linguistic identities against Hindutva, but the BJP portrays them as forces dividing Hindus —and even India. Almost all opposition leaders harp on the danger of Hindutva fomenting social instability.

These strategies gloss over one fundamental truth: Hindutva and its politics of religious polarisation demonise religious minorities, activists subscribing to progressive ideologies, and dominant caste groups opposed to the BJP—Yadavs in Uttar Pradesh and Bihar, and Jats in Haryana, for instance. Yet, even among them, it’s the religious minorities whose lives and livelihoods are imperilled.

Repression with a class-community character

For most Hindus, the state’s sharp edge under Hindutva isn’t a threat, as it was under the Emergency, with repression having a far more widespread class-community character. It was consequently easy to build opposition against Indira Gandhi. Hindutva targets selectively, limiting the widening of social alliance opposed to it. There are also advantages in supporting the BJP. Privileged Hindu groups gain from its perspective of development; and the poor receive direct benefit transfers. Dependent on Hindutva, they are invested in its survival.

This bond between Hindus and Hindutva is based on residual Hindu-Muslim animosity inherited from history. The animosity has been heightened through false narratives that portray Muslims as a drag on India’s rise, and as prone to violence, with militancy in Kashmir cited as an example. They are accused of disrespecting Hindu religious sentiments as they refuse to hand over temples that were allegedly turned into mosques in medieval India. A political-cultural milieu conducive to Hindu assertion has been spawned.

Herein lie two lessons for the opposition to draw: Hindu anxieties, real or imagined, can neither be glossed over nor pandered to. The former doesn’t deter the BJP from raising contentious Hindu-Muslim issues; the latter only has them to plumb for the more authentic articulator of their anxieties. On top of it, their dependency on Hindutva has them to acquiesce to its inherent authoritarianism, fearing state reprisals and loss of material benefits.

The opposition’s challenge is to shift away from the politics of doles to bringing about structural changes to the Indian economy. Doles enable the poor to survive but don’t remove their precarity, as agriculture and land reforms, security of tenure in jobs, the end of contractual labour, etc., do. It’s in this context that the manufactured crisis of Hindu identity can be more effectively addressed, for the anxieties it generates is deepened because of the hand-to-mouth existence of the underclasses.

To illustrate my point, here’s the example of Assam’s Raijor Dal leader Akhil Gogoi, who defied the overwhelming majoritarian consolidation in Assam to win from the Hindu-numerous constituency of Sibsagar this Assembly election. Gogoi isn’t a Hindu chauvinist. He has, in fact, protested against the eviction of Muslims, depicted as illegal immigrants. He argues that Hindutva would steamroll Assam’s unique cultural identity, as it would gradually impose the north Indian Hindu culture on the State.

Yet, his rhetoric hasn’t alienated Hindus, who are nearly 75 percent in his constituency. The explanation for it lies in his agenda: he asks his audience to buy clothes from shopkeepers, not shop online, for then the profits go to giant retailers; he speaks of improving irrigation to introduce three cycles of crops a year, and establishing finishing schools in villages, where formal school education would be combined with skilling, and village-based industries. Citing statistics to show that large tracts of land from which Muslims were uprooted in Assam were transferred to big businesses, Gogoi frames Hindutva’s politics of polarisation as a subterfuge to nourish the neoliberal economy.

Just as one swallow doesn’t make a summer, one MLA cannot remake a democracy. Gogoi’s politics may lack the economist’s finesse and his party is centred around him, yet it indicates a method of neutralising Hindutva by giving people a stake in democracy more enduring than doles do. Only then would they resist the hollowing out of democracy.

Ajaz Ashraf is a senior journalist from Delhi and the author of Bhima Koregaon: Challenging Caste.

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