The biggest challenge facing India is preventing a right wing takeover and stopping the country from becoming a Pakistan. The ambition of the alt right is to make India into a Hindu state, with goons, vigilantes, religious leaders and shadowy para-political organisations serving as shock troops. Unlike Pakistan, the right wing takeover here will not be through military rule but instead, as in Russia and Turkey, through cultural aggression, fake news, elections, majoritarian politics and constitutional engineering.

In the three years since the right came to power India has been marked by fear and loathing, in equal proportion, with no end in sight. Let’s recall the key incidents and developments since 2014 including religion-charged election campaigns (in UP most recently); ‘love jihad’ allegations against Muslim men; ‘ghar wapsi’ conversions; beef bans; killings of Muslims accused of eating, storing or transporting beef; murders of rationalists and intellectuals (Kalburgi, Pansare); attacks on art, literature and film (Jaipur Art Summit, Yogesh Master’s face blackening, violent campaigns against films such as PK and Padmavati); clashes on college and university campuses; arrests of students on sedition charges; and assaults on Indians from the northeast and on African students.

Against this, conservative friends argue that communal violence has declined during BJP rule. The data on communalism is always suspect, but allowing the assertion to be true, it bears saying that right wing forces are more violent in opposition and less so in power. Clearly, it is in their interest to staunch communal incidents when they rule and to encourage them when out of power.

In the end, a rightist takeover will occur not through communal violence and brute force but rather by elections and constitutional changes. The constitutional makeover would include establishment of an executive president, declaring India a Hindu state, abridging minority and other rights, giving special political status to Hindu sants, mahants and yogis, tampering with the national flag and abolishing the name India for the country. The takeover will come after a sustained campaign of micro-level, vigilante-led cultural assaults against minorities and liberals, reminiscent of Russia and Turkey.

Can a right wing takeover be stopped? The opposition parties could stand together, but given their fickleness and dislike of each other as much as of the ruling party, this is improbable. The judiciary might stop right wing authoritarianism, but its own social and political conservatism and quirkiness get in the way – its pronouncements on the national anthem show how unpredictable it can be.

Civil society groups might combine to uphold liberal freedoms, but government attacks on NGOs and the illiberalism of many of these organisations make them suspect in the struggle against authoritarianism.

Far more hope-inducing are the contradictions within the right – between BJP and RSS leaderships; between BJP and Shiv Sena ambitions; between extreme-right vigilante groups and those supporting at least a measure of due process; and, finally, between different centres of power within BJP – within the central party, and between the central command and state units.

Perhaps the biggest contradiction, though, will be between Prime Minister Narendra Modi and chief minister Yogi Adityanath. Adityanath is a saffron-robed Modi – younger, harder and on the rise. He leads the biggest state in India and therefore has unrivalled mobilisational power. The prime minister must already be feeling the heavy breathing on his neck.

The contradictions within the right wing could lead to ‘outbidding’, with factions and leaders trying to surpass each other in extremist behaviour. This would take India even further to the right. Or the rivalries could disillusion the electorate and finally frighten the opposition into uniting. In any case, the next general elections will be pivotal. Not because the right wing and Modi will be defeated, but rather because the extent of internal fissures among rightist groups will be much clearer.