India's regional parties are hollowing out from the inside — and the centre is the only thing that grows

On 24 June 2026, The Indian Press published a long read titled The unravelling of regional parties: Why they are imploding. The diagnosis it lays out is neither new nor flattering to the political class that built modern India. State-level parties — the parties that for four decades forced national coalitions, dictated ministerial choices in New Delhi, and gave India its claim to being a genuine federal democracy — are bleeding leaders, voters and organisational depth simultaneously. The headline question is not whether the trend continues. The headline question is what fills the vacuum when it ends.

A regional party, in the Indian sense, is more than a state affiliate. It is a vehicle for caste arithmetic, linguistic identity and local patronage that no national outfit can replicate. The Dravidian parties in Tamil Nadu, the Trinamool Congress in West Bengal, the Samajwadi Party in Uttar Pradesh, the Nationalist Congress Party and Shiv Sena in Maharashtra, the Rashtriya Janata Dal in Bihar — these outfits dictated prime ministers between 1989 and 2014. They were the proof that India was not a majoritarian one-party state pretending at federalism. Their collapse is therefore not a normal political churn. It is the slow removal of a load-bearing wall inside the Republic.

The mechanics of the rot

The Indian Express reading identifies three pressure points that have converged on regional parties in the same window. The first is leadership succession. Many of these outfits were built as personal vehicles around a dominant founder — MGR, Jayalalithaa, Karunanidhi, Mulayam Singh Yadav, Lalu Prasad, Bal Thackeray, Sharad Pawar in his pre-splinter phase — and the second generation has neither the charisma nor the organisational command to hold the machine together. Splits have followed. The NCP split between Ajit Pawar and Sharad Pawar in 2023 is the textbook case: a national party in a state skin, fracturing along the line of who controls the patronage network in Pune and Mumbai. The Shiv Sena split between Uddhav Thackeray and Eknath Shinde produced the same outcome — two claimaints, one organisational carcass, and a friendly state government in Maharashtra that walks away with the institutional spoils.

The second pressure point is the criminalisation of the leadership class. Several of these parties, the Indian Express notes, are now effectively family-managed firms whose principals face investigation. That is not a left-right story. It is a structural story about how money, muscle and party machinery have fused at the provincial level. When the founder is under prosecution, succession becomes a fight over who controls the legal-defence slush fund, not who controls the policy direction.

The third pressure point — and the one that gets the least column-inches — is the collapse of the cadre. Parties that once ran booth-level operations, paper memberships and youth wings have shed their foot soldiers as the cost of politics has risen and the rewards of informal economy work have outpaced the stipends of a district volunteer. A party without a booth president is a party that cannot dispute a count.

What the centre is doing while the regions bleed

The Bharatiya Janata Party, both as national party and as state-level incumbent, has read this collapse with cold efficiency. The strategy is not to destroy regional parties — it is to absorb their carcasses. In Maharashtra, the BJP governs as the senior partner of a coalition built on the split Shiv Sena and split NCP. In Bihar, the Janata Dal (United) and the BJP run a coalition that would have been unthinkable without the weakening of Lalu Prasad's RJD. The pattern is consistent: wherever a regional party splits, the BJP sits on the larger half.

The Indian National Congress, by contrast, has been the passive beneficiary — a phrase that is generous. The Congress is no longer a competitive force in most states. Its decline is older than the BJP's rise and runs on a separate clock: it is the story of a party that stopped renewing itself in the 1990s and is now discovering that charisma is not a renewable resource. But its weakness sharpens the BJP's relative position. Two parties, one dominant.

The federalism question underneath

The argument worth taking seriously is that India's federal balance is shifting from a three-pillar arrangement — centre, state parties, regional parties — to a two-pillar arrangement in which the centre negotiates directly with state chief ministers, most of whom are now in the BJP or in BJP-aligned coalitions. The states are not weaker on paper. The Finance Commission still transfers resources. The Governor's office is still a federal backchannel. But the political weight that state-level parties once carried into national coalition arithmetic is gone. New Delhi does not need them to govern. It does not need them to pass legislation. It does not need them to form a majority in the Rajya Sabha as urgently as it did a decade ago.

That shift has a policy dimension. The Goods and Services Tax Council, the One Nation One Election proposal, the reorganization of centrally-sponsored schemes — each of these moves power toward the Union government. None of them required the regional parties to be defeated. They only required the regional parties to be irrelevant.

The counter-read and the contestable bits

The argument is not airtight. Regional parties still win elections in Tamil Nadu, West Bengal and Odisha. The DMK and the Trinamool Congress remain formidable outfits with deep local roots. The Brindavanam of Andhra Pradesh may yet rebuild under Jagan Mohan Reddy. The Indian Express's framing risks a presentism in which a long downward trend is read as terminal. Indian state politics has a record of late recoveries — the Samajwadi Party's 2012 resurrection in Uttar Pradesh, the Trinamool's sweep of the 2014 general election in West Bengal under precisely these conditions.

The other contestable point is whether the BJP's absorption strategy is sustainable. Coalition arithmetic is unforgiving: the smaller a junior partner, the louder its demands, and the BJP's state allies (Shinde, Ajit Pawar, the JD(U)) are not natural moderates. The cost of holding a coalition together is rising as the bargaining power of the smaller partner falls. Maharashtra in 2026 is already showing the strains.

The honest reading, then, is that the regional parties are weaker than at any point since 1977 — but the centre is not yet strong enough to govern India alone. The intervening space is contested, and will be for at least one more electoral cycle. After that, the question is whether Indian federalism survives the transition or becomes an administrative fiction with a parliamentary costume.

This publication reads The Indian Express's piece as a structural argument about the unwinding of India's coalition-era federalism, not as a routine campaign dispatch. The wire frames it as a story about individual party failures; the underlying story is about the disappearance of a political class.