Following the recent Indian parliamentary elections, the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) failed to get a simple majority and is now dependent on its shifty partners in the National Democratic Alliance (NDA) to remain in power.
By P.K.Balachandran
Colombo, June 6: When the results of the elections to the 18th Lok Sabha (the Lower House of the Indian parliament) were announced on June 4, India’s Prime Minister and leader of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), Narendra Modi, had scored a hat trick. He had secured a third term in office, the second Indian Prime Minister to have done so after Jawaharlal Nehru sixty years ago.
But Modi and his BJP had come back not in glory but in crutches. Hee had failed to get a simple majority. It had secured only 240 seats in the 543-member House, while a party needs 272 seats to claim a simple majority and form a government.
Modi could still form a government thanks to his partners in the National Democratic Alliance (NDA) who give him a total of 294 seats. But the going is expected to be tough for him given the party’s dependence on its allies and the significant growth of the opposition in parliament.
Throughout the long election process, from April 19 to June 1 to be precise, the BJP was aiming at 330 to 370 for itself and 400 plus for the NDA. But it ended its flight of imagination with its wings clipped. It had secured only 240 by itself. Together with the NDA it got 294, a little above the simple majority.
In the last elections in 2019, the BJP by itself had bagged 303 and the NDA as a whole had secured 353. The opposition was puny with the biggest party, the Congress, having just 52. The opposition INDIA group has 232 MPs now.
The BJP also failed to achieve its much trumpeted goal of ridding India of the Congress party, which it identified with the privileged classes, pretentious urban liberals, and minorities, especially Muslims. Congress Mukt Bharat (An India free from the Congress) was Modi’s primary slogan.
However, at the end of the day, the tally of the Congress had risen from 52 in 2019, to 99 in 2024. And the Congress-led INDIA group had collectively bagged 232.
Role of TDP and JD (U)
As it stands, the BJP can remain in power only with the support of its partners in the NDA, especially, Telugu Desam Party (TDP) with 16 MPs, led by Chandrababu Naidu and the Janata Dal United (JDU) led by Nitish Kumar with 12 MPs.
But Nadu and Nitish are known to be unreliable as per their record so far. They might jump ship and join the Congress-led INDIA if Modi did not meet their demands.
Besides demanding plum posts like the Home and Finance Ministries and the parliament Speakership, Naidu and Nitish could demand hefty special packages for their States, which had been long standing but unfulfilled demands in the case of both. Modi would be hard put to it to accede to these demands.
Further, Naidu and Nitish are ideological opposites of Modi. Neither Naidu nor Nitish is a believer in Hindu majoritarianism (Hindu Rashtra or Hindutva). They also support a caste-wise census and giving reservation to backward Muslims, policies which are anathema for Modi and the BJP.
However, Modi could always use money power and governmental investigating agencies at his command to bring these and other dissenters in line. And as Modi and Home Minister Amit Shah have done so many times in the last 10 years, they could also break the TDP and the JDU in the same way they split the Shiv Sena and National Congress Party (NCP) in Maharashtra and usurped power in that State.
But given the BJP’s inadequate numbers in parliament, Modi might find it difficult to use some of these methods. Verily, the halcyon days marked by unlimited power are over.
Reasons for Decline
In these elections, the opposition INDIA alliance fully utilized the popular revulsion against the use of investigating agencies to gag critics and the media, and put opposition leaders in jail. Chief Ministers Arvind Kejriwal of Delhi and Hemant Soren of Jharkhand were jailed, the former when election campaigns had commenced. The bank account of the principal opposition party, the Congress, was frozen just ahead of the elections.
The voice of the opposition was silenced by throwing out more than a hundred opposition MPs from parliament. Their absence was used to pass some important measures without a proper debate.
In the ten years in power, the BJP did ensure economic growth but it was growth without employment. Unemployment had soared to 8% in 2024 from 4% in 2014 when Modi came to power for the first time. The promise of generating 20 million jobs a year was not kept. There was a mismatch between the country’s GDP growth and the common man’s economic condition. The income gap was wider than what it was during British rule. The number of billionaires was gallopping while the man in the street was getting poorer.
The BJP regime had neglected agrarian distress. Farmers from Punjab and Haryana, Western Uttar Pradesh and Rajasthan had to agitate day in and day out for a year and half before the controversial farm laws were withdrawn. Farmers’ suicide due to indebtedness had reached epidemic levels in Maharashtra.
In a bid to corner Hindu votes, BJP leaders, beginning with Modi, tried to deepen the Hindu-Muslim divide by accusing the Congress of planning to give undue benefits to Muslims, even by taking away buffaloes from farmers, and mangalsutras from married women (the gold chains worn as a sign of marriage). He described Muslims as “intruders” (foreign infiltrators) who bred children to increase the Muslim population.
The Congress won in Banaskantha, the very district where Modi made his infamous “buffalo seizure” remark targeting Muslims. The BJP lost in Banswara in Rajasthan where Modi infamously referred to Muslims as infiltrators who bore more children.
The BJP lost also in Faizabad, the district in which Ayodhya is located. It is in Ayodhya that a grandiose temple for Lord Ram was built by Modi with an eye on the Hindu vote. BJP suffered significant losses in Dalit-dominated constituencies because many BJP leaders were declaring from election platforms that the party wants to win 400 plus seats to be able to amend the constitution to do away caste-based reservations.
Most of the middle and lower castes in India consider caste-based reservations in government departments and educational institutions as necessary for their progress. Most political parties support such affirmative action.
The BJP-led government had turned a blind eye to the massacre and arson which went on for months in the Eastern State of Manipur. This resulted in the BJP failing to win any seat there. The BJP had not put up a candidate in Kashmir whose autonomy was taken away in 2019.
In West Bengal, the Trinamool Congress won 29 seats while the BJP’s tally fell from 19 to 12. Among the winners was Mahua Moitra from Krishnanagar, who was expelled from the Lok Sabha on unproven charges last year.
The INDIA alliance swept Tamil Nadu with the BJP not even getting a single seat. The BJP was wrecked in Maharshtra. The JDU performed as well as the BJP in Bihar. Uttar Pradesh which had been an impregnable BJP fortress for 10 years was badly breached.
The rising disillusionment of the people with the system could be seen in the declining polling percentages throughout the seven-phase elections.
The elections also brought to the fore the role of the alliance between money bags, government machinery and the corporate-owned media. But India’s social media rose to the occasion and filled the yawning gaps in the coverage of issues by the mainstream, government-linked and corporate-controlled media.
“The emergence of social media as the key player in this election has everything to do with the complete abdication of the bulk of traditional media from its professional purpose of framing political issues with credibility,” wrote Yamini Aiyar and Neelanjan Sircar in The Hindu.
Indeed, YouTube influencers like Druv Rathee, Raveesh Kumar, Deepak Sharma, and Nilu Vyas, to name only a few, got millions of subscribers in India, where social media penetration is both wide and deep.
END
