Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi through some steps, The most popular leader in the world. Ahead of the 2024 elections, his Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) had secured a single majority in the Lok Sabha (Parliament of India) – which was expected to increase greatly after the vote counting. The party regularly boasts that it will win 400 Lok Sabha seats, easily enough to amend India’s constitution along the party’s preferred Hindu nationalist lines.
But when the results were declared on Tuesday, the BJP won only 240 seats. Not only did they fall short of expectations, they actually lost their parliamentary majority. When Modi remains prime minister, he will do so at the head of a coalition government – meaning he will rely on other parties to stay in office, making it difficult to continue his ongoing assault on Indian democracy.
So what happened? Why did Indian voters deliver a devastating blow to a Prime Minister whom, by all accounts, they mostly like?
India is a huge country — the most populous in the world — and one of the most diverse, making its internal politics extremely complex. A precise assessment of elections requires granular data on voter breakdown across caste, class, linguistic, religious, age and gender divisions. Currently, these numbers do not exist in sufficient detail.
But after looking at the data available and talking to several leading experts on Indian politics, I feel comfortable drawing at least three conclusions.
First, voters punished Modi for pushing his Hindu nationalist agenda to fix India’s uneven economy. Second, Indian voters had some genuine concerns about the decline of liberal democracy under BJP rule. Third, opposition parties ran a smart campaign that took advantage of Modi’s weakness on the economy and democracy.
Understanding these issues is important not only for Indians. The country’s election has some universal lessons about how to defeat a dictator — ones that Americans may want to heed, especially heading into its elections in November.
A new (and unequal) economy
Modi’s biggest and most surprising loss Two of the most populous states in India have come: Uttar Pradesh on the North and Maharashtra on the West. Both states have previously been BJP strongholds – places where the party’s key strategy of pitting the Hindu majority against the Muslim minority has mobilized Hindu support for Modi and his allies.
A prominent Indian analyst, Yogendra Yadav, I have already seen the cracks. Swimming against the Indian media tide, he correctly predicted that the BJP would lack a ruling majority.
Traveling across the country, but especially in rural Uttar Pradesh, he predicted the “return of normal politics”: that Indian voters were no longer swayed by Modi’s charismatic nationalist appeal and instead began to worry about how politics was affecting their lives.
Yadav’s conclusion came in no small part from hearing voters’ concerns about the economy. The issue was not GDP growth – India’s World’s fastest growing economy — rather the distribution of the fruits of growth. While some of Modi’s top aides hit it rich, many ordinary Indians suffered. About half are Indians Unemployed between 20 and 24; Indian farmers have Modi has repeatedly protested the policy That they have felt hurt in their livelihood.
“Everyone was talking about price rise, unemployment, state of government services, plight of farmers, [and] Labour’s struggle,” Yadav wrote.
According to London School of Economics political scientist Pavitra Suryanarayana, this kind of discontent was quite visible on the ground. In the months leading up to the election, he researched public perceptions of Modi’s economic policies in three regions of India. He found that voters blamed Modi for three major economic policy mistakes: a failed attempt Replace cash payments with electronic transfersA Disastrous Covid-19 responseand a A tax on goods and services that favors the wealthy over small businesses.
“These three economic disasters have led to general dissatisfaction with economic mismanagement,” he tells me.
In general, he believes there is a perception among the Indian electorate that the BJP sees them as “recipients of schemes” rather than “rights-bearing citizens”, meaning that Modi’s government has put various policy tests ahead of the basic ability to provide good jobs, access. Healthcare, and high quality education.
Interestingly, many of these principles are not new. We are several years past the pandemic, and the demonetization experiment took place in full in 2016. Indian voters know that Modi has been in power for 10 years and seems to have turned against the incumbent based on a general perception that he botched some element of his governing agenda.
Sadanand Dhume, a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute who studies India, said, “We know for sure that Modi’s strong image and confidence were not as popular with voters as the BJP had assumed.”
The lesson here is not that the pocketbook is all about Trump’s identity-based appeal; Recent evidence from wealthy democracies suggests the opposite is true. Rather, even the reputation of populist leaders is not intact. When they make mistakes, even some time ago, it’s possible for voters to remember those mistakes and prioritize them over the culture wars that populists are currently waging.
Liberalism strikes back
The Indian Constitution is a liberal document: it guarantees the equality of all citizens and includes measures designed to enshrine equality in law. A signature goal of Modi’s time in power has been to dismantle this liberal edifice and replace it with a Hindu nationalist model that relegates non-Hindus to the social margins. In pursuit of this agenda, the BJP has concentrated power in Modi’s hands and undermined key pillars of Indian democracy (such as a free press and an independent judiciary).
Before the election, there was a perception that the Indian electorate either did not care much about the attack on liberal democracy or was largely in agreement with it. But BJP’s surprisingly poor performance suggests otherwise.
Published by India’s leading newspaper The Hindu An essential post-election data analysis What we know about the results is broken down. One of the more striking findings is that opposition parties have grown in parliamentary seats reserved for members of “scheduled castes” — the legal term for Dalits, the lowest caste group in the Hindu hierarchy.
Caste has long been an essential divide in Indian politics, with Dalits generally supporting the left-wing Congress party of the BJP (long seen as an upper-caste party). Under Modi, the BJP ostensibly tipped the class balance by elevating all Hindus — including Dalits — over Muslims. Yet now Dalits seem to be coming back to the Congress and its allies. Why?
According to experts, Dalit voters feared the result of a BJP landslide. If Modi’s party achieves its target of 400 seats, it will have enough votes to amend India’s constitution. As the constitution contained several safeguards designed to promote Dalit equality – including a first-world affirmative action system – that was seen as a serious threat to the community. It seems, at least based on preliminary data, that they voted accordingly.
The Dalit vote is an example of the ways in which Modi’s brazen willingness to attack Indian institutions alienates voters.
Uttar Pradesh (UP), India’s largest and most electorally important state, was the site of a major anti-Muslim campaign by the BJP. it is It has started its campaign informally Earlier this year in the UP city of Ayodhya, during a ceremony celebrating one of Modi’s crowning achievements: the construction of a Hindu temple on the site of a former mosque demolished by Hindu nationalists in 1992.
Yet the BJP not only lost UP, it specifically lost the constituency — the city of Faizabad — where the Ayodhya temple is located. It is as direct an electoral affront to BJP’s ideology as one can imagine.
In Maharashtra, the second-largest state, the BJP forged a strategic alliance with Ajit Pawar, a local politician facing serious corruption charges. Voters have seemingly punished Modi’s party for turning a blind eye to Pawar’s crimes against public trust. Muslim voters across the country Turned for the opposition To defend their rights against Modi’s attacks.
The global lesson here is clear: even populist authoritarians can overreach.
By making “400 seats” a campaign slogan, an all-but-overt signal that he wanted to remake the Indian state in his liberal image, Modi practically rang an alarm bell for constituencies worried about the outcome. So they set out to stop him en masse.
The BJP’s poor electoral performance is, in no small part, a direct result of its leader’s overzealousness.
The return of the Gandhis?
Of course, Modi’s mistakes might not have mattered if his rivals had failed to capitalize. Indian opposition, however, was far more effective than most observers expected.
Perhaps most importantly, many opposition groups coordinated with each other. Forming a united bloc called India (Indian National Developmental Inclusive Alliance), they worked to ensure that they did not steal votes from each other in critical constituencies, positioning Bharat Alliance candidates to win direct battles against BJP rivals.
The leading party in the opposition bloc – the Congress – was also more united than people thought. Its most prominent leader, Rahul Gandhi, was widely dismissed as an aloof Napo baby: his father Rajiv and grandmother Indira, both pale imitations of the former Congress prime minister. Now his critics are rethinking things.
“I owe Rahul Gandhi an apology because I seriously underestimated him,” said Manjari Miller, a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations.
Miller identified Gandhi’s yatra (march) across India as a particularly clever strategy. These physically grueling voyages across the length and breadth of India show that he was not just a privileged son of Indian political royalty, but a politician willing to take risks and meet ordinary Indians where they were. He used to do it during the journey Meet marginalized groups’ voters directly And rail against Modi’s politics of hate.
“The personality he developed — as someone kind, caring, inclusive, [and] Resolute in the face of oppression — really worked and captured the imagination of young India,” said Suryanarayan. “If you spend any time on Instagram, [you’ll see] A whole generation has now woken up to Rahul Gandhi’s very interesting videos.”
This also has a lesson for the rest of the world: strategic innovation from the opposition is important even in an unfair electoral context.
There is no doubt that, over the past 10 years, the BJP has stacked the political deck against its opponents. They have consolidated control over large swaths of the national media, changed campaign finance laws to their advantage, subjugated the famously independent Election Commission of India and even intimidated the Supreme Court into letting them bypass it.
The opposition, however, managed to find ways to compete even in unfair conditions. Strategic coordination between them has helped to consolidate resources and improve BJP’s cash leverage. Direct voter campaigns like Yatra have helped counter the BJP’s dominance in the national media.
To be clear, the opposition has yet to secure a majority. Modi will be in power for a third term, probably thanks in large part to the way he rigged the system in his favor.
Yet there is no doubt that the opposition deserves to be celebrated. Modi’s power has been shrunk and his myth of invincibility scarred, perhaps fatally. Indian voters, like Brazil and Poland Before them, their compatriots dealt a major blow to the authoritarian party.
And that’s something worth celebrating.
