A significant percentage of India’s voters has delivered a resounding “sober-up” message to the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) generally and Prime Minister Narendra Modi individually, both of whom seemed high on unbridled political power.

The fact that the BJP was unlikely to cross even the 250-seat mark in the 543-member parliament is being widely seen as a personal political defeat for the prime minister who pulled out all stops as his party’s sole and often abrasive campaigner. A political party needs a simple majority of 272 to form a government and as things stand at the time of writing this, the BJP was way short of even that on its own.

For Modi, who began the election season with the ludicrously grand slogan of “Ab ki baar, 400 paar”, meaning “this time around, more than 400 (seats)”, the crushing fall to not even 300 along with its allies together known as the National Democratic Alliance (NDA) is catastrophic. Throughout the early part of his campaigning his party used to speak in terms of winning 370 seats on its own. By that measure it is falling short by more than 120.

Of the just a shade less than 970 million people, some 642 million Indians voted in this election. If the figure of the BJP’s vote share of about 48 percent is accurate, some 308 million voted for the party. In a country of 1.4 billion people with an eligible electorate of about 970 million that is a stunningly low mandate for a prime minister who claimed during a television interview amid gasps that he was convinced he was not of biological origin and had a divine sanction.

Message from voters 

In many ways, once the final figures are certified, the 2024 election will be remembered as one where India’s hundreds of millions of ordinary people, a large percentage of them in grave economic distress, voted to create a stronger opposition of the kind they would like against an out-of-control prime minister. It is also a sharp riposte to the politics of division and hatred that the BJP, piloted by Modi, practiced.

Of course, the voters have likely handed Modi a third term, giving him some bragging rights as the third longest serving prime minister after Jawaharlal Nehru and his daughter Indira Gandhi once and if he finishes his third term in 2029.  

The outcome returns India to coalition politics where a prime minister, unaccustomed to indulging competing forces within the NDA coalition so far and even less so with the opposition, will be forced to fundamentally recalibrate his working style. The outcome has significantly erased the aura that the BJP’s cash-rich election machine worked so assiduously to create around him with Modi himself engaging in the kind of profligate spectacle politics at the cost of the national exchequer not seen in India.

The Indian National Developmental Inclusive Alliance (I.N.D.I.A), a 37-member group of parties that took on Modi, is scheduled to meet on June 5 to discuss their course of action, particularly whether they should remain in the opposition or attempt to cobble up enough numbers to form a government themselves.

As of now, there are expectations that Modi will return as a third term prime minister albeit drastically cut to size. Yogendra Yadav, one of India’s most well-known psephologists whose prediction about the election result turned out to be extraordinarily accurate, said during an interview with the online journalist and columnist Barkha Dutt that there cannot be a “more humiliating defeat” than this for Modi considering his party controlled every lever of power, including the media and financial resources. “If the BJP gets one seat less than 300, it is a moral defeat. If they get one seat less than 272, it is a political defeat. And if they get one seat less than 250, it is a personal defeat for the prime minister. All three have happened today,” Yadav said.

Jockeying for power 

There are those who also apprehend the advent of internal power struggle within the BJP against Modi’s overarching supremacy so far. Add to that the party’s poor showing in its bastion state of Uttar Pradesh and there are the makings of a major power shift. Uttar Pradesh Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath, a temple priest turned hardline Hindu nationalist politician who was sometimes mentioned as Modi’s likeliest successor, suddenly looks diminished in the aftermath of the BJP losing so many seats in his state.

The next few days will witness a great deal of jockeying for power in Delhi if the INDIA chooses to stake a claim to forming a government once it thinks it has the numbers. However, in the Indian system traditionally it is the single largest party which has the first right to forming a government. The BJP is that party with likely 239 seats. The Indian National Congress is at number two with 100 seats as of this writing.

However, India’s politics are known to produce great surprises and right now it is anybody’s game although the NDA together has 295 seats. That is where Modi’s early boast of “this time around, more than 400 (seats)” seems ridiculous considering they have not crossed even 300 combined.

(The writer is a Chicago-based journalist, writer and commentator. Views are personal. By special arrangement with Indica)