India 2024 election results show Prime Minister Narendra Modi winning third term, but with a smaller mandate

New Delhi – The results of the 2024 Indian elections show that Prime Minister Narendra Modi is poised to win his third term, with the political alliance led by his Bhartiya Janata Party (BJP) on track to win a solid majority of the seats up for grabs in Parliament. from India. Final numbers were expected later on Tuesday, but the results of the world’s biggest democratic elections seemed clear: Modi will keep his job, but with a shorter mandate than was widely expected or promised by his party.

For the first time, the giant of Indian politics for more than a decade will be forced to form a coalition government with smaller, albeit allied, parties.

The final results were expected to maintain the balance revealed by the preliminary vote count, which showed that the BJP-led National Democratic Alliance (NDA) won about 295 of the 543 seats in the Lok Sabha, the lower house of the Indian Parliament.

This would put the NDA easily above the 272-seat threshold needed to form a new government and would almost certainly see Modi continue as prime minister – but it is a much smaller share of the vote than the BJP had promised with its slogan of “Abki Baar 400 “. paar” or “it will exceed 400 this time.”

The BJP alone did not muster the votes to form a third single-party government under its leader.

It is also a much smaller majority than predicted for the NDA by most polls, which largely predicted a huge 350-seat victory for the alliance.

More than 643 million people — out of nearly a billion eligible voters — went to the polls throughout the election period in India. massive elections in seven phases. It was conducted over six searches and was marked by a bitter campaign that unfolded along religious and sectarian lines. Voting also took place during a scorching heat wave who was blamed for the deaths of about 80 people across the country, including at least 10 election workers.

Overall, the NDA alliance looks set to lose more than 60 seats compared to its performance in the last general election five years ago, and the rival alliance INDIA (Inclusive Alliance for Indian National Development), led by the opposition Congress party , looks set to lose out on gaining more than 100 new seats. This will give INDIA more than 230 seats in total – at a time when it had been virtually ignored by many political experts and researchers.

Still, speaking Tuesday night at BJP headquarters, Modi remained upbeat about what was, regardless of the margins, a victory, calling the results a “victory for the world’s largest democracy” and “a victory for the 1.4 billion people of India”.

“Every Indian is proud of the electoral process and the country’s credibility,” declared the incumbent.

But the mood on Tuesday at the Congress Party headquarters in Delhi was also one of celebration, despite their failure to win the election, as leaders declared the performance a sign of the “revitalization” of a party that has ruled India for more 50 of his 77 years. as an independent nation.

“It was a fight to save the constitution,” senior Congress official Rahul Gandhi told reporters on Tuesday. “Congress and its alliance partners were not only fighting against the BJP but also against government institutions, intelligence agencies, half of the judiciary which were captured by PM Modi.”

“The people of India saved the Constitution and democracy,” he said in a tweet. “The needy and poor people of the country supported India to protect their rights.”

The BJP-led alliance suffered heavy losses in the leading states of Uttar Pradesh, which sends 80 members to parliament, and Maharashtra, which has 48 seats, when compared to their performance in the last two general elections in 2019 and 2014, when they won. record majorities.

The Congress-led alliance made big gains in both states, including in the Uttar Pradesh metropolis of Ayodhya, where Modi personally – and controversially – opened a vast new Hindu templethe Ram Mandir, a few months before the election.

“I think the BJP played the Ram Mandir card too early,” Dr. Subir Sinha, director of the South Asia Institute at the University of London, told CBS News, referring to the temple in Ayodhya. The construction of the massive temple, on the site of a destroyed mosque, has long been central to the BJP’s Hindu nationalist politics in a country deeply divided along religious lines.

“The BJP thought it was a vote-getting machine,” Sinha said.

The BJP alliance’s reduced parliamentary majority could mean that some of Modi’s unspecified “big and difficult decisions”, which he promised to take in the first 100 days of his third term, “will have to be scrapped”, Sinha predicted. .

“The BJP relied on Modi’s popularity to promote many local candidates who were not popular,” Dr. Irfan Nooruddin, a professor of Indian politics at Georgetown University, told CBS News.

He said the BJP’s reduced majority would make it more difficult for the Modi government to pass some of the planned reform measures and force it to work more flexibly with a new coalition government, “something that Prime Minister Modi was not willing to do.” accustomed”.

The counting of votes was due to end on Tuesday night and the inauguration ceremony of the new government was scheduled for June 10.