COUNTERWEIGHTS EDITORS, GANATSEKWYAGON, ON, CANADA. WEDNESDAY, JUNE 12, 2024. In our last Indian election report about a month ago we wrote : “As things still look to us, Modi almost certainly will win his third term as prime minister on June 4. His BJP might not be as strong in the Lok Sabha as it has been for the past five years, but he will remain in firm command …”

Now that the June 4 results have been digested and acted on, we could somewhat self-indulgently urge that our May 15 report was close enough to what has finally happened.

Narendra Modi, leader of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), has this past weekend been sworn in for a third consecutive term as Indian PM — a record previously matched only by Jawaharlal Nehru and the Indian National Congress (INC : although all told Indira Ghandi served almost as long in office as Nehru — without winning three consecutive elections.)

At the same time, after 2024 Modi’s BJP is not at all as strong in the Lok Sabha as it was after the 2019 election (or the one before that in 2014). In 2019 the BJP won 303 seats in the so-called lower house of parliament. This year it managed only 240 seats. And this year : “During campaigning, Modi said his party would likely win 370 seats”!

Like many others, in fact, we did underestimate just how badly Narendra Modi’s BJP would finally do in the Lok Sabha in 2024, while still at least managing to hang on to the office of prime minister.

All told the Indian lower house has 543 seats — making 272 a bare governing majority. And this is 32 seats more than the 240 the BJP finally won this year. In both 2014 and 2019 the BJP had won a majority of seats in the Lok Sabha all by itself. In 2024 it has to rely on support from other parties in the same broader conservative alliance to make up the at least 32 seats it needs.

From this standpoint, while 41 different political parties finally won seats, the 2024 Indian election was a fight between two main party alliances. Narendra Modi’s BJP-led National Democratic Alliance (NDA) won 293 seats — 21 more than a bare governing majority.

Rahul Ghandi’s Indian-National-Congress-(INC)-led Indian National Developmental Inclusive Alliance (INDIA) won 232 seats. This was impressive compared to both 2014 and 2019 and many expert predictions for 2024. But it was still 40 seats short of a bare governing majority.

To make an already too long story a little shorter, for the time being at least there now seem to us barely half-informed fans of Indian politics, far away in central Canada, two new and largely unexpected developments in the world’s largest democracy.

First, as explained by Sheikh Saaliq at the Associated Press : “This is the first time the BJP under Modi has needed support from its regional allies to form a government after a decade of commanding the majority in Parliament … Together, the parties in the NDA coalition secured 293 seats in the 543-member lower house of Parliament … Modi’s coalition government now largely depends on two key regional allies — the Telugu Desam Party in southern Andhra Pradesh state and Janata Dal (United) in eastern Bihar state — to stay in power.”

Second (and to us more interestingly), whatever else, the surprisingly strong performance of Rahul Ghandi’s opposition INDIA alliance has left what the BBC has called a “dent” in “ Brand Modi.” The Modi BJP’s drive to turn the progressive secular world’s largest democracy launched by Nehru and the Congress Party after the Second World War into some Hindu nationalist version of the Islamic republic in Pakistan eg — has now faltered in a serious way

Finally, a recent headline from the Times of India suggests some complexities in the second of and possibly even both these developments : “Why Hindu liberals and Muslims are divided on poll verdict … While liberals are interpreting the results as a rejection of Hindutva politics, Muslims believe nothing will change under the new government.” And as almost always rings true in the very end, only time will tell! For the moment we’ve finally been at least slightly encouraged by the 2024 Indian election — a prospect we were not expecting at all.