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There now seems to be general recognition about the praxis the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), via the state it controls, is pursuing.

In Sikkim in 2024, the then-president of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), Shri J.P. Nadda, had explicitly pronounced “goodbye to regional parties” and admonished that they had to come to the “mainstream” and that the “mainstream is BJP“.

All that is in line with the ruthless ways in which, through the last decade, the ruling BJP has systematically either co-opted, or split or simply destroyed out of sight a plethora of regional political formations in state after state.

Pointless here to offer the litany of a count, since this phenomenon has received wide coverage in public forums.

The recent defeats of the Rashtriya Janata Dal in Bihar, the Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam in Tamil Nadu and of the Trinamool Congress in West Bengal (however grotesquely manipulated) cannot but have emboldened the rampaging right-wing to conclude that the time has come to make the final push towards achieving a unitary state, with only the Congress left to be demolished.

In passing, the Indian National Congress is the only political force that has never aligned with the BJP in any shape or form at any level of governance – an ideological fact that justly alarms the right-wing which has otherwise got the better of all others at one time or the other.

The refusal of the grand old party, however, to declare its own demise for now is therefore a conundrum that the right-wing must tackle in ways supplementary to outright electoral victories (however those victories are managed).

(You may have noticed that it is the Indian National Congress that continues to remain the chief target of attack in Shri Modi’s tireless polemics – a dead give-away that he knows the Congress to be at bottom the chief antagonist of the communal right-wing and the most likely to offer challenge to it at the level of Union government-formation despite its many predicaments.)

The obvious course to obviate the pitfalls of such a regressive eventuality is to obtain a two-thirds legislative majority in both houses of parliament – a circumstance that can then make it possible for the Modi government to pass Bills to effect such structural/systemic transformations as will hasten the project of dismantling multi-party democracy, installing the scheme of a single nation-wide election a template that........

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