THE SUPREMOS

“Once you have built the big machinery of political power, remember you won’t always be the one to run it.” So said P.J. O’Rourke, the celebrated American political satirist. As Indian politics heads towards the summer of 2018, the nation edges closer to testing the fragility of political power once again. The dominant political party of the moment, the BJP, is in government directly or indirectly in as many as 18 of India’s 29 states. Prime Minister Narendra Modi and BJP president Amit Shah plan to extend that footprint further— they have found a hungry general driven by revenge in the Northeast in Himanta Biswa Sarma. But the assembly elections in Karnataka, Madhya Pradesh, Rajasthan and Chhattisgarh will determine whether the empire continues its expansionist streak or begins to wane. Meanwhile, challenger Rahul Gandhi hopes Karnataka will be Modi’s Waterloo, though the Congress president is yet to set his own house in order. He needs more forces to take on Modi on the national landscape but Mamata Banerjee is not interested in being his lieutenant. Existential crises in politics is making strange bedfellows out of bitter enemies. The charisma of Modi and the electoral armoury of Shah, combined with backroom general Arun Jaitley and performer Nitin Gadkari, may still give them an edge over their scattered opponents, but a former ally—N. Chandrababu Naidu—exposed a chink in the NDA armour when he left at the beginning of 2018. His departure has put a question mark on the invincibility of the BJP. A possibility no one had even dared to imagine just a year ago.