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The victory won by Prime Minister Narendra Modi and the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) in India's seventeenth general election was historic. It marked the first time since 1971 that a sitting prime minister returned to power winning an outright majority in two consecutive elections, and it was a triumph whose scale and comprehensiveness stunned even the most veteran observers. The BJP decimated the Indian National Congress. Having long dominated Indian national politics, Congress is now a shadow of its former self, reduced to less than a tenth of Parliament.
A handful of statistics illustrate the extent of BJP dominance. Of 191 head-to-head contests between the BJP and Congress, the BJP won 175. Moreover, the average BJP candidate's winning margin thickened from 16 to 20 percent between the previous election in 2014 and 2019.1 The BJP also weakened the hold of the various regional parties that have been significant players in Indian politics since the 1990s.
With this victory, the BJP has firmly established itself as the leading national political party, ushering in a new phase in Indian politics best characterized as "India's second dominant party system."2 The BJP's path to dominance began with its 2014 victory; the 2019 win signals that this dominance is now complete. How did the BJP achieve this, and what does the 2019 election teach us about the dynamics of India's new dominant party? Finally, what implications does this victory hold for governance and politics over the next five years?
Analysts have identified money power, organizational strength flowing from embeddedness in the larger Hindu-nationalist movement, and the right-wing populist politics practiced by the prime minister as pillars of the BJP's electoral success. An important but sometimes overlooked aspect of that populist politics is the BJP's approach to welfare policy. Here, the Modi-led BJP mixes left-wing populism in favor of the poor with right-wing cultural majoritarianism (about four-fifths of all Indians are Hindus, and the BJP claims to speak for Hindu concerns and interests).
Welfare programs—strategically deployed—are important instruments through which Modi has secured moral legitimacy and voter trust. In this sense, Modi's welfare politics is linked to the BJP's Hindu-nationalist (or Hindutva) hegemonic project. In order to understand India's new party system and the character of the hegemony that...