India, June 26 -- The Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) is at the peak of political influence today. Between 2024 and now, it has broken new ground in states where it was either a junior partner in a coalition or had never had a stint in power. Its opponents are divided, defeated, and facing defections. Where does the BJP and Indian politics go from here?

Many commentators see the present-day dominance of the BJP as the hollowing out of democracy and institutional guardrails in India. At the risk of being uncharitable, they suffer from what Srinath Raghavan calls in his book "every generation's illusion that its own problems are uniquely oppressive". Those who felt jarred by a historian's terse polemic would do well to read Milan Vaishnav's 2...