Modi’s BJP lost its majority, meaning it will be heavily dependent on allies this term. Nothing could have been more symbolic on June 4 – the day Indian national election results showed Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s party losing its majority in the Parliament – than the outcome in the parliamentary seat of Faizabad in north India.
In
January 2024, Modi led the highly-publicized consecration ceremony of the grand
new Ram Temple (Ram Mandir) on the same land where the 16th century Babri
mosque stood before its demolition in 1992. The prime minister and his
Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) hoped the temple would usher in a new era of Hindu
nationalist pride in the country and ensure a third term for the party at
India’s helm.
Lord Ram
has been the BJP’s biggest political mascot. It was a movement seeking the
demolition of the Babri Masjid in Ayodhya town of Uttar Pradesh state in north
India and the “reconstruction” of a Ram Temple on the same site that triggered
the BJP’s nationwide rise in the 1990s.
But June
4 revealed that the much-hyped temple inauguration with full state patronage
failed to impress voters, including a majority of Hindus.
The BJP
lost the Faizabad parliamentary seat, which encompasses Ayodhya. Hindus compose
83 percent of Faizabad’s demography.
Reflecting
the trend, in a rather unexpected development, Modi’s party lost its majority
in India’s Lok Sabha, the lower house of the Parliament. Of the 543
parliamentary seats, the Hindu nationalist BJP’s tally stood at 240, well below
the majority mark of 272.
Since
its allies have won another 44 seats, the BJP-led National Democratic Alliance
(NDA) may still be able to form a government, though with an unnervingly slim
majority.
In 2014,
the BJP won 282 seats on its own, and the NDA’s tally stood at 336. They
bettered the tally in 2019 when the BJP alone won 303 seats and its allies
added another 50. This time, Modi had called for 370 seats for the BJP and 400
for the NDA.
Mallikarjun
Kharge, the president of the Congress, India’s main opposition party, described
the result as a “mandate” against Modi. “This is his political and moral
defeat,” said Kharge, pointing out that the BJP “had asked for votes in the
name of one person, one face.”
The
Congress won 99 seats, a significant improvement from his 2014 tally of 44
seats and 2019 tally of 52. Overall, the opposition platform of the Indian
National Developmental Inclusive Alliance, popularly called the INDIA bloc,
notched up a tally of about 230 seats.
Some
parties are not part of either alliance, and both sides are now trying to woo
them to stake claims on government formation.
A
Remarkable Verdict
“The
June 4 verdict signifies a victory for the people of India. They have taught
Modi a lesson,” said Nilanjan Mukhopadhyay, author of multiple books on Hindu
nationalists and Modi, including “Narendra Modi: The Man, The Times.”
Mukhopadhyay
described the result as a “corrective verdict” not swayed by mega narratives
and hyperboles. He saw the results as a rejection of a highly centralized
system of governance where the government is synonymous with one individual.
“The
verdict shows that people do not want to be governed by a megalomaniac but by a
collective. It is a rejection of authoritarian style of governance and very
much comparable to the 1977 verdict,” he said.
In 1977,
India voted out Prime Minister Indira Gandhi following her 21-month dictatorial
rule under provisions of Emergency that allowed her to crush all dissent.
According
to Sanjay Kumar, a professor and co-director of Lokniti, a research program at
the New Delhi-based Center for the Study of Developing Societies (CSDS), India
gave a split verdict.
“There
is no pan-India narrative. The BJP suffered in states that it dominated for the
past 10 years but also earned popularity in states where it has never been in
power,” Kumar told The Diplomat. “The BJP’s ability to expand beyond the
traditional hold has saved it from a rout,” he said.
Modi’s
personality cult has been the BJP’s key strategy and asset over the past
decade. Toward the end of the 2024 election campaign, Modi even claimed that
his birth was not biological – that God sent him on purpose. The opposition
parties, on the other hand, hammered hard on this personality cult.
Notably,
Modi’s victory margin from the Varanasi constituency in north India came down
from 480,000 votes in 2019 to 150,000 votes this time.
Apoorvanand,
a professor of Hindi literature at Delhi University and a political
commentator, pointed out that Indian democracy has seen leaders with a greater
majority, like Jawaharlal Nehru and Rajiv Gandhi – who had a parliamentary
strength of over 400 seats – and Indira Gandhi, who had over 350 seats.
“However,
never before in Indian democracy had a leader presented himself or herself as
someone sent by God. This hubris, to a people trained in democratic traditions
who have memories of strong leaders, turned out to be unacceptable,” he told
the Diplomat.
According
to Ajay Gudavarthy, a political scientist at New Delhi’s Jawaharlal Nehru
University (JNU), the loss of the BJP should not be taken lightly, given the
power of manipulation the BJP had at its disposal using money and the media.
“People
proved that India continues to be driven by a robust common sense, something
that the Faizabad defeat reflects,” said Gudavarthy, author of the book
“Politics, Ethics and Emotions in ‘New India.’”
A
Remarkable Election
The
BJP’s losses in its bastions of the Hindi heartland – the region of India’s
most-spoken language, Hindi – were already anticipated by a section of
political observers. Setbacks for Modi’s party in Maharashtra, the
second-largest state, were also predicted.
Hindi
heartland states propelled Modi to power in 2014. Of the 228 parliamentary
constituencies, 195 elected BJP candidates and 11 voted for its allies. In
2019, the belt gave the BJP 183 seats and another 25 to its allies. It is where
religious issues have traditionally had the highest electoral appeal.
This
time, the BJP’s tally from the Hindi heartland states of Uttar Pradesh, Bihar,
Madhya Pradesh, Gujarat, Rajasthan, Chhattisgarh, Haryana, and Delhi came down
to 135 seats, while its allies won another 20.
The
biggest shocker came from Uttar Pradesh, the heartland of the three-decades-old
Ram Mandir movement.
Of the
80 seats in India’s largest state – where the chief minister is a saffron-clad,
monk-turned-politician – the BJP won only 33. Its allies won another three.
INDIA bloc partners Congress and Samajwadi Party bagged 43 seats.
In 2014
and 2019, the BJP won 72 and 63 seats in the state, respectively.
Apoorvananda
said that his students from different parts of Uttar Pradesh had been telling
him since last year that the youth in the state were fed up with being used by
the Hindu nationalists only as their footsoldiers.
“The
youths in Uttar Pradesh realized that the BJP was using an utopia of a Hindu
nation to hide their incompetency in the real issues of governance, such as
creating opportunities for employment and wealth generation,” Apoorvanand said.
Maharashtra,
India’s second-largest state with 48 parliamentary seats, dealt the BJP-led NDA
another rude blow. The NDA’s tally in the state stood at 41 in 2014 and 2019.
But political equations drastically changed from the end of 2019 due to the
change of alliance partners, the subsequent splits in two regional opposition
parties and the toppling of the opposition-led state government.
Opposition
parties had blamed the BJP for engineering the splits by using money and
government agencies. A sympathy wave in favor of the opposition became the talk
of the town during the electoral campaign.
Eventually,
the BJP’s tally dropped to nine in the state, with its allies winning another
eight. The Congress and its allies, meanwhile, tallied 30 seats in Maharashtra.
Gudavarthy
said that the Maharashtra results show the people do not approve of disruption
of ethics beyond a limit.
When the
election campaign started early in April, political observers sensed the 2024
election was significantly different from 2014 and 2019, as the “Modi wave” was
missing, at least on the surface. There was no visible pan-India
anti-incumbency wave either. This prompted some political analysts to suspect
the mandate would be for a status quo.
However,
analysts like Sanjay Kumar and psephologist-turned-political activist Yogendra
Yadav started pointing out that the campaign narrative changed mid-way, that
the BJP’s call for return to power with a bigger majority had backfired. Yadav
earlier told The Diplomat that while there was no wave, he was sensing some
undercurrents.
According
to Kumar, the BJP wanted to contest the election on issues like the Ram Mandir
and the scrapping of Article 370 (concerning the sensitive Kashmir region), but
other issues like inflation and unemployment dominated the electoral campaign.
“The
opposition campaign terming the election as one to save the Constitution and
protect the reservation that lower Hindu castes enjoy in education and jobs
connected more with people than the BJP’s issues,” said Kumar.
Several
other political observers think the verdict reflects how people were scared of
giving the BJP too much power.
Expansion
and Alliances
The BJP
suffered losses to regional forces in India’s four largest states, losing 29
seats in Uttar Pradesh, 14 seats in Maharashtra, six in West Bengal, and five
in Bihar. Among mid-sized states, the party lost 11 seats in Rajasthan and
eight in Karnataka.
However,
the BJP increased its tally by 12 in the eastern state of Odisha, which it
swept, and gained four seats in Telangana, three in Andhra Pradesh, and one in
Kerala in the south.
Kumar
pointed out that in the southern states, the BJP’s campaign strategy was
significantly different from the north.
“They
were campaigning more on the government’s international image, India’s global
achievements and how India has emerged as a major global player. They knew
temple sentiments don’t work in the south,” he said.
India’s
opposition took a unique strategy in this election. They allied at the national
level under the umbrella of the INDIA bloc but its components decided to strike
state-specific arrangements. As a result, the opposition coalition members
fought each other in multiple states.
The
Congress fought the communists in Kerala in the south but allied with them in
eastern India’s West Bengal to fight against the ruling Trinamool Congress
(TMC), another member of the INDIA bloc.
The Aam
Aadmi Party (AAP), which rules Delhi and Punjab, allied with the Congress in
Delhi, Haryana, and Gujarat, but the two fought each other in Punjab.
Opposition
parties hoped that fighting each other in states where the BJP is not in power
could help reduce the BJP’s chances of gaining. In the end, the BJP lost six
seats in West Bengal and failed to make many gains in Kerala and Punjab.
What has
worked the best in the BJP’s favor are two alliances that it struck in the last
six months – with Bihar Chief Minister Nitish Kumar’s Janata Dal (United) in
January 2024 and former Andhra Pradesh Chief Minister N. Chandrababu Naidu’s
Telugu Desum Party in March.
The
JD(U) chief, a veteran BJP ally, had parted ways with the ruling party in 2020
and was one of the early initiators of the INDIA bloc in mid-2023. However,
toward the end of the year, Nitish Kumar was upset with the developments at the
opposition initiative and the BJP was quick to get him back on their side.
The
support of Naidu’s 16 MPs and Kumar’s 12 is now the BJP’s key to retaining
power.
Should
Modi be able to form the government for the third time – a feat achieved only
by India’s first prime minister, Jawaharlal Nehru – he is unlikely to have the
same freedom with which he boldly pushed the Hindu nationalist agenda over the
past 10 years. The support bases of his allies are mostly outside the Hindu
nationalist votary.
If there
was another development that symbolized the electoral outcome, it was the
result at Banswara in Rajasthan of northwestern India.
It was
from Banswara on April 21 that Modi launched his tirade of anti-Muslim
speeches, which he continued with till the end of the election campaign on May
30. When the results were counted, Banswara handed the BJP a humiliating
defeat, with its candidate finishing 15 percentage points behind the winner.
***Snigdhendu
Bhattacharya, the author of two non-fiction books on India’s ultra-Left and the
Hindu right, writes and comments on India’s politics, environment, human rights
and culture.
Snigdhendu
Bhattacharya is an independent journalist, writing on India’s politics,
history, data, environment, human rights and culture since 2005. A former
special correspondent of the Hindustan Times, he has been published in The
Wire, Outlook magazine, The Caravan, Mongabay India, Huffpost India, Nikkei
Asia, The Third Pole, Deccan Herald, The Times of India, Live History India and
IndiaSpend, among others. He takes a special regional interest in eastern and
northeastern India and Bangladesh. He has two books of political nonfiction
published by HarperCollins India — Mission Bengal: A Saffron Experiment (2020)
and Lalgarh and the Legend of Kishanji: Tales from India’s Maoist Movement
(2016). He is a recipient of EJN’s Asia-Pacific Climate and Environmental Story
Grant.