Politwist: it’s game on!

Written off in the exit polls, the Indian National Developmental Inclusive Alliance (INDIA) won 234 seats

The National Democratic Alliance (NDA) was headed for a narrow majority in the Lok Sabha polls on Tuesday evening after a resurgent opposition alliance delivered an unexpected setback to Prime Minister Narendra Modi by posting record-busting performances in three of India’s most populous states capitalising on local discontent and concerns about the future of the Constitution.

Prime Minister Narendra Modi greets party workers upon his arrival for a meeting at the party headquarters as the party leads in the Lok Sabha elections amid the counting of votes, in New Delhi, on Tuesday. (PTI)

With the NDA at 293 out of the 543 seats, Modi was still on course to becoming only the second PM after Jawaharlal Nehru to secure a third consecutive term but the Bharatiya Janata Party’s failure to win an outright majority on its own will put the strongman leader at the mercy of his mercurial allies, Nitish Kumar and Chandrababu Naidu.

“People have placed their faith in NDA, for a third consecutive time! This is a historical feat in India’s history,” Modi posted on X.

Written off in the exit polls, the Indian National Developmental Inclusive Alliance (INDIA) won 233 seats, buoyed by the astonishing revival of the Congress in northern India, startling performances by allies Samajwadi Party and Trinamool Congress that pegged back the BJP in Uttar Pradesh and West Bengal respectively, and regional powerhouses Udhhav Thackeray and Sharad Pawar trouncing their intraparty rivals in Maharashtra. Together, INDIA shaved off nearly 60 seats from the 2019 tally of the NDA, which was lifted by its sweeps in Madhya Pradesh, Gujarat and Odisha.

“The people of India have saved the Constitution and democracy. The marginalised and poor stood with INDIA to protect their rights,” senior Congress leader Rahul Gandhi, who won both his Wayanad and Rae Bareli seats by over 300,000 votes.

In some ways, the messy results were a vindication for the Opposition’s ragtag coalition and a call back to the momentous elections of 2004 that saw Atal Bihari Vajpayee’s BJP bundled out of power after suffering a shock loss, attributed largely to a tone-deaf India Shining campaign that angered rural masses struggling with economic reverses.

To be sure, the BJP emerged as the single largest party by a wide margin – almost two-and-a-half times bigger in size than its closest rival, the Congress which stopped just shy of 100 – but it was hard to ignore that it fell 130 seats short of its stated goal of 370, and also 32 short of a straight and simple majority.

By evening, the ruling party was attempting to claim victory as it underlined the importance of a triumph in its third outing as tens of thousands of people jostled outside the BJP headquarters in Delhi under a shower of confetti on an oppressively hot evening.

Modi projected confidence . “We will write a historic chapter of big decisions in our third term…First time since 1962 any government has come to power for the third time after completing its two terms,” Modi said to loud cheers.

He did not acknowledge the party’s disquieting reverses in some of its strongest regions such as Uttar Pradesh, Haryana and Rajasthan.

In effect, after two national wave elections that saw the BJP post the first single-party majority in 2014 and record its best ever results in 2019, 2024 signified a return to the old normal of Indian politics – where broad national issues jostle for space with pertinent local concerns, where regional satraps are capable of swinging the elections in their respective fiefs and where caste and community alignments are seldom calcified.

A string of Opposition leaders, led by Congress chief Mallikarjun Kharge, West Bengal chief minister Mamata Banerjee and Nationalist Congress Party (SP) leader Sharad Pawar, called for the PM’s resignation.

“The PM has lost credibility, he should resign immediately because he had said that this time they would cross 400 seats. I had said that there is a doubt that the BJP would cross even 200 seats. Now they have to hold the feet of Nitish Kumar and Chandrababu Naidu,” Banerjee said.

All eyes will now be on Bihar chief minister Nitish Kumar, who defied expectations and anti-incumbency to deliver a surprisingly strong performance in Bihar, and Naidu, who swept Andhra Pradesh to script an extraordinary comeback saga after being incarcerated just six months ago. Both veteran leaders have been part of coalitions before – including the first iteration of the NDA under Vajpayee – and will likely be tough negotiators.

The six-week-long elections sagged under the weight of controversies ranging from Modi’s communal rhetoric, the election commission’s tardy responses to allegations of hate speech and initial delays in releasing turnout numbers. When the 642 million votes were counted on Tuesday, they held out three takeaways.

One, against all odds, the 25-party INDIA bloc successfully prevented the elections from turning into a presidential contest for the first time in the Modi era. Despite being hamstrung by financial limitations and the absence of a pan-Indian leader, the Opposition managed to make the elections local, bringing into play old caste equations and the ground pull of regional leaders. This hurt the BJP the most in India’s three most populous states – Uttar Pradesh, Maharashtra and West Bengal – where its tally was slashed by half compared to 2019. Questions about reservations, the Constitution, regional pride and unemployment became pertinent issues against this backdrop, helping the Opposition rout the BJP in these provinces and across large swathes of south India.

Two, the BJP’s biggest gains came from central India – its old bastion of Gujarat, where it won 25 out of its 26 seats, neighbouring Madhya Pradesh where it swept all 29 seats, Chhattisgarh, where it won 10 out of 11 seats, and an emphatic victory in Odisha, where it won 19 out of 21 seats in a drubbing for the Biju Janata Dal – showing that Modi’s connect was intact in large chunks of India. But in other states that BJP dominated in 2019, such as Rajasthan or Haryana, local discontent, appointment of unknown faces as CMs, rural and farm distress and regional pride took a toll.

And three, the Opposition’s performance was bankrolled by the Congress’s revival in the heartland. The party was neck-and-neck with the BJP in Haryana and Rajasthan, a state where it lost assembly polls just six months ago. The Congress’s strike rate in direct contests with the BJP rose dramatically from 7.9% in 2019 to 28.8% in 2024. Conversely, the NDA’s performance was dragged down not so much by the allies, but the BJP’s reverses in big states. The BJP lost 63 seats compared to its 2019 tally of 303, but other NDA allies increased their tally from 49 in 2019 to 53 in 2024. This means that the balance of power will shift discernibly in favour of the allies.

In effect, this meant a bouquet of results such as the BJP losing Faizabad, under which Ayodhya falls, Muzaffarnagar, where Jat-Muslim riots 11 years ago altered the political terrain, Banswara, where Modi first made communal remarks against Muslims, and Amethi, where a little-known Gandhi family acolyte defeated Union minister Smriti Irani by a margin bigger than that of Modi in Varanasi.