Hope in unity: Those who want to defeat BJP in 2019 have to come together

Mr Modi and his party may feel emboldened to continue standing alone but the Opposition will have to draw quite the opposite lesson

In the end, Prime Minister Narendra Modi was, as ever, the Bharatiya Janata Party’s (BJP’s) not-so-secret weapon — his storm of last-minute rallies grabbed headlines and attention and brought the BJP within a whisker of an absolute majority in the Karnataka Assembly elections. The BJP’s combination of the mastery of booth-level politics — administered by party president Amit Shah — and Mr Modi’s unparalleled connect with the electorate continues to make the BJP unquestionably the dominant political force in India. That these two powerful factors, combined with the well-known tendency towards anti-incumbency displayed by Karnataka’s voters, failed to provide the