Narendra Modi’s Political Legacy: Reshaping India’s Party System

Beyond his own party’s fortunes, Modi’s tenure has coincided with a broader reshaping of how India’s party system operates, affecting regional parties, the Congress party’s national standing, and the basic coalition arithmetic that has defined Indian national politics for decades. This article examines that broader shift.

From a Fragmented System to BJP Dominance

Political scientists studying India’s party system have periodically described the pre-2014 period, spanning roughly the late 1980s through the early 2010s, as India’s “third party system,” characterised by a fragmented, highly regionalised political landscape in which no single national party could reliably govern alone, requiring often unwieldy multi-party coalitions to form governments. Modi’s 2014 and 2019 victories, delivering outright BJP majorities, disrupted this pattern significantly, prompting analysis including from the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, in a piece titled “The Resilience of India’s Fourth Party System,” to describe a shift toward a more BJP-dominant national political landscape, even as India’s underlying regional political diversity persisted at the state level throughout this same period.

The Effect on Regional Parties

This national-level BJP dominance has coexisted with a more complicated picture at the regional level. Outlook India’s analysis, titled “Paradigm Shift in Indian Politics: BJP’s Rise, Regional Parties’ Decline and the Future of Federal Democracy,” specifically traces how several regional parties that were once significant national coalition power-brokers, particularly during the fragmented coalition era of the 1990s and 2000s, saw their national relevance diminish considerably as BJP’s own direct electoral reach expanded into states and regions those parties had previously dominated, even as several other regional parties, particularly in southern and eastern India, have continued to hold their own ground or, in some cases, strengthened their position specifically in opposition to BJP’s national expansion.

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The Congress Party’s Diminished but Not Eliminated Role

The Congress party, India’s dominant political force for most of the decades following independence, saw its Lok Sabha seat count fall to historic lows during Modi’s first two terms, 44 seats in 2014 and 52 in 2019, figures covered in more detail in our earlier article on vote share trends, before recovering to 99 seats in 2024. This trajectory reflects a genuine, significant weakening of Congress’s national standing relative to its historical dominance, though its 2024 recovery and its continued role as the largest single party within the broader INDIA opposition bloc indicate the party has not been eliminated as a national political force, even if its relative position compared to BJP has clearly diminished from the decades when it was India’s default governing party.

The Return of Coalition Politics in 2024

Perhaps the most structurally significant recent shift is BJP’s own return to coalition dependency following the 2024 election, covered in detail in our earlier article on that result, ending a decade in which the party had governed with outright majorities and reintroducing genuine coalition-partner leverage, this time held by Chandrababu Naidu’s Telugu Desam Party and Nitish Kumar’s Janata Dal (United), into national government formation for the first time since Modi took office. This shift illustrates that even a decade of apparent national-level BJP dominance has not permanently eliminated coalition politics from India’s national governance, a reminder that party-system shifts described as significant realignments can still contain considerable ongoing fluidity rather than representing a fully settled new equilibrium.

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The Opposition’s Own Adaptation

The opposition landscape has itself adapted structurally to BJP’s national rise, most visibly through the formation of the INDIA bloc, a coordinated alliance of opposition parties assembled specifically ahead of the 2024 election aimed at consolidating anti-BJP votes more effectively than earlier fragmented opposition efforts had managed, an alliance-building response PBS News covered under the framing of opposition parties “largely written off ahead of election” managing a partial “comeback” that meaningfully narrowed BJP’s parliamentary majority.

Why Party-System Shifts Are Rarely Permanent

India’s political history offers a useful caution against assuming any current party-system configuration, however dominant it appears at a given moment, represents a permanent new equilibrium. The Congress party’s own multi-decade dominance following independence eventually gave way to the fragmented coalition era of the 1990s and 2000s, which itself gave way to the more BJP-dominant period beginning in 2014, a pattern of recurring realignment across India’s post-independence political history that suggests the current period, however it eventually gets labelled by political scientists, is itself likely to be superseded by some further reconfiguration in the coming decades rather than representing history’s final word on how Indian national politics organises itself.

Bottom Line

Modi’s tenure has coincided with a genuine reshaping of India’s party system, from a fragmented, coalition-dependent landscape toward a more BJP-dominant national politics during his first two terms, a shift that diminished but did not eliminate Congress and several regional parties, before the 2024 election’s coalition-dependent result and the INDIA bloc’s partial consolidation of opposition votes demonstrated that this realignment remains an ongoing, still-evolving process rather than a fully settled new political order.

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Abhyudaya Verma