Analysis: For many analysts, India's election result marks a return to 'normal' politics with coalition governments ruling at the centre
By Jivanta Schottli and Markus Pauli, DCU
Between 19 April and 1 June, India’s 18th general elections took place over seven phases, with 642 million braving an unprecedented heatwave to cast their vote. On Tuesday, 4 June, the electorate’s verdict caught many by surprise with the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) doing less well than expected, and the opposition Congress party doing much better than anticipated.
While the BJP maintained a lion’s share of votes at around 36%, and was returned as the single largest party with 240 out of a total of 543 parliamentary seats, it failed to hold on to its absolute majority of 303 seats from the 2019 general elections. The Congress party, which had shrunk to an all-time low of 52 seats in 2019, managed to recoup some of its losses to reach 99 seats in 2024.
Two days prior to the results, exit polls on a number of Indian news outlets were released and uniformly projected a large-scale victory for the BJP and its coalition partners in the NDA – the National Democratic Alliance. Embargoed until the last round of polling, the exit polls were eagerly watched, triggering a massive stock market rally in expectation of a returning ruling party with an even stronger mandate.
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While Narendra Modi is likely to return as India’s 14th Prime Minister, achieving a historic hat trick of three consecutive wins – a feat managed only once before by the country’s first Prime Minister, Jawaharlal Nehru – the BJP will now have to reckon with the loss of 63 seats and two major coalition partners, well-known for their proclivity to switch sides.
Most of BJP’s losses took place in the northern State of Uttar Pradesh (UP), with 29 seats lost, and in the State of Maharashtra, home to the BSE (the Bombay Stock Exchange), where the BJP lost 24 seats. UP is India’s largest and most populous state, with a population of 241 million sending the biggest number of MPs to the powerful lower house of the national parliament. It was regarded as a traditional bastion of the BJP and is the state where a temple to the Indian god Ram was recently built in the face of contestation. Religion as a campaign theme, and communal politics did not, it seems, translate into votes for the BJP.
Initial analyses also suggest that the BJP’s internal politics may have played out in a way that acted to its detriment, with locally preferred candidates being sidelined by the party’s leadership. The UP-based socialist Samajwadi Party (a Congress Party ally) has emerged as a big winner, gaining 32 seats and becoming the second largest opposition party in the Lok Sabha, with 37 seats. Another powerful regional party, the All India Trinamool Congress from West Bengal, led by Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee, won 29 seats.
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From RTÉ Radio 1's Today with Claire Byrne, Esha Mitra, Freeland Journalist based in India and Dr Jivanta Schottli discuss the 2024 election in India
The BJP did make inroads into unchartered territory, including the eastern State of Odisha, where it looks set to displace a sitting leader who has headed the State assembly since 2000. Furthermore, in New Delhi, the National Capital Territory, the BJP won all seven seats, maintaining its record of a clean sweep from the previous two general elections.
For both the Congress and the BJP, carefully constituted pre-poll alliances now take centre stage. For the BJP, two key alliance partners have emerged as kingmakers: Nitish Kumar leading the Janata Dal (United) from the eastern State of Bihar (with 12 seats), and Chandrababu Naidu, leading the South Indian party Telugu Desam Party from Andhra Pradesh (with 16 seats). For the Congress party, its leadership of The Indian National Developmental Inclusive Alliance (I.N.D.I.A), which was seen initially as a highly fragmented opposition alliance, has paid off.
For many analysts, the result marks a return to 'normal’ politics with coalition governments ruling at the centre. The previous ten years, with the BJP ruling as a single majority party, was seen as moving towards a replication of the dominant one-party system under the Indian National Congress, which lasted from 1947 till about 1967. Coalition governments became the norm during the 1980s and 1990s and, contrary to expectations, delivered effective reforms and policy decisions (such as the signing of the Civil Nuclear deal with the United States).
Although the results have been widely interpreted as a shock for the BJP, and the opposition claims the verdict as a rejection of the BJP, the party nevertheless retains the largest vote share, and has won alone nearly two and a half times the seats of the Congress (240 versus 99 seats).
Both leaders - the BJP’s Narendra Modi and Rahul Gandhi of the Congress - have claimed the result as a triumph for, and victory of, India’s democracy. Despite the scale of the election, results were made available four days after voting ended, thanks to the use of electronic voting machines, which have fully replaced ballot papers since the 2004 Lok Sabha elections, and which nowadays produce a paper trail for cross-checking.
In the face of record temperatures – nearly 50 Celsius in New Delhi – the overall voter turnout did not dip, though it varied widely (from 73.5% in West Bengal to 52% in Bihar), and the participation of female and first-time voters continues to grow. Most crucially, the results have confirmed that a competitive party system remains in place with powerful regional parties and politicians. Hopes are high for consensus-oriented politics.
Dr Jivanta Schottli is Director of the Ireland-India-Institute and Assistant Professor in Indian Politics and Foreign Policy at DCU. Dr Markus Pauli is Assistant Professor in Political Science at DCU. Their open-access book Statecraft and Foreign Policy: India 1947-2023, can be downloaded for free here.
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The views expressed here are those of the author and do not represent or reflect the views of RTÉ
