While ideologies unite, individuals divide. In the sprawling arena of Indian democracy, where more than 500 parties national, regional, state-level and even unrecognised compete for the mandate to govern a nation of 1.5 billion, a stark truth is emerging. Ideologies can bind disparate groups into coherent movements.
Personalities, however, often fracture them when their aura fades. Across the country, once-mighty regional outfits built around a single leader’s charisma, caste arithmetic or linguistic pride are unravelling with surprising speed. The glue that held them together was never abstract doctrine but the promise of proximity to power, and that promise is proving perishable.
Take West Bengal’s Trinamool Congress. Mamata Banerjee carved it out of the Congress in 1998, infusing it with a potent mix of anti-Left populism, Bengali cultural assertion and personalised welfare. For two decades, it functioned less as a party and more as an extension of one woman’s will.
When electoral reverses struck, the collapse was swift. Within hours, the edifice revealed itself as a patronage network rather than an ideological home. Legislators who had sworn loyalty to ‘Didi’ discovered that loyalty had always been transactional. Without the assured return to power and the accompanying lifestyle, the flock scattered. It was not the defeat of an idea but the exposure of an individual’s diminished capacity to deliver.
A parallel drama unfolded in Tamil Nadu. The Dravidian parties once stood as bulwarks of regional identity, language pride and social justice against perceived northern cultural hegemony. Yet both the DMK and the AIADMK have lost their once-unquestioned dominance.
The DMK’s organisational muscle could not prevent an erosion of its core appeal when leadership transitions diluted the ideological fire. The AIADMK, already splintered after Jayalalithaa’s passing, found itself led by successors who lacked the commanding presence to hold the flock. Lawmakers began migrating towards newer platforms that promised relevance in a changing national landscape.
Maharashtra offers perhaps the clearest textbook case. Shiv Sena, forged by Bal Thackeray as a movement of Marathi pride and later Hindutva assertion, split when Uddhav Thackeray proved unable to match his father’s commanding style. Eknath Shinde’s rebellion succeeded because a critical mass of legislators calculated that alignment with the national dispensation offered better prospects than loyalty to a diminished legacy.
The same calculus played out in the Nationalist Congress Party. Sharad Pawar, a master strategist who had broken from Congress decades earlier, could no longer shield his flock from the gravitational pull of the ruling coalition. His nephew Ajit Pawar led a section across, recognising that the elder Pawar’s stature, however formidable, no longer translated into assured tickets or protection.
Even the Aam Aadmi Party, which burst onto the scene with an anti-corruption, governance-first ideology and secured thumping majorities in Delhi and Punjab, has not been immune. Arvind Kejriwal built a formidable personal brand around welfare delivery and confrontation with the establishment.
Yet several prominent figures quietly shifted allegiance to the BJP, calculating that the national party offered swifter advancement and institutional ballast. These are not isolated tremors. They reflect a deeper structural shift.
The generation of regional satraps who dominated the coalition era—Sharad Pawar, M Karunanidhi, Mulayam Singh Yadav, Jayalalithaa, Naveen Patnaik, Prakash Singh Badal—commanded respect through decades of grassroots work and personal credibility. They could win their own seats and deliver victories for others.
Their successors, often educated abroad and accustomed to different rhythms of life, have struggled to replicate that connect. N Chandrababu Naidu’s son Lokesh and TRS founder K Chandrasekhar Rao’s son KTR are more global citizens than Telugu biddas. While sons are finding it difficult to rise from East, they are setting in the West.
Barring a few exceptions, the next generation has shown limited appetite for relentless constituency work. The resulting frustration among cadres has accelerated desertions. At the centre of this realignment stands Prime Minister Narendra Modi.
He has achieved what few leaders manage: the fusion of a commanding personality with a coherent ideological project of assertive nationalism and welfare delivery. Through direct communication, targeted schemes and institutional leverage, he has created a bond with voters that bypass traditional party intermediaries.
Even after the 2024 verdict denied the BJP an outright majority, Modi’s authority within the government and the party has arguably grown rather than diminished. For ambitious politicians across the spectrum, the BJP now appears as the most reliable vehicle for electoral success and long-term political security. They cannot reliably shield their members from investigative agencies, nor can they guarantee legislative berths in an era of national consolidation.
The old arithmetic of regional satraps extracting concessions from a weak centre no longer holds. As a result, the political marketplace is witnessing a wave of mergers, acquisitions and quiet realignments. The Congress, after years of attrition, has shown signs of stabilisation. It remains the only national alternative with residual organisational presence in several states, and is viewed by many as the eventual counterweight should the BJP’s dominance ever face serious challenge.
The Left, once a formidable ideological force, has receded further as market realities and voter aspirations shifted. The battlefield is narrowing towards a contest between a left-of-centre formation anchored by the Congress and a right-of-centre formation led by the BJP—both increasingly national in character, both led by individuals who have successfully married personality to ideology.
This is not merely the story of individual leaders losing relevance. It is the story of Indian democracy shedding an earlier phase of extreme fragmentation. The coalition era produced vibrant regional voices but also chronic instability, policy paralysis and the elevation of transactional politics over governance.
The current churn, while painful for those caught in its vortex, may be producing a more accountable system in which parties must demonstrate sustained performance rather than rely on one person’s fading charisma.
A politics dominated by two national poles may reduce space for nuanced local voices. The test for Indian democracy will be whether this consolidation preserves genuine competition and institutional checks, or whether it slides into a personality-driven dominance that merely replaces multiple small fiefdoms with one large one.
It appears that, as of now, India’s political architecture is not collapsing. It is being reconfigured. The coming years will reveal whether this reconfiguration produces a more coherent and effective democracy or simply concentrates power in fewer hands.
What is already clear is that the age of the purely personality-driven regional fortress is drawing to a close. In its place, a sturdier contest between competing national visions may be taking shape—one in which ideas and ideologies crafted by mighty individuals will ultimately decide who governs and how.
Read all columns by Prabhu Chawla
prabhuchawla@newindianexpress.com
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