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Economic pain, regional grievances and an apparent misreading of the public mood contributed to an upset in India’s general election that cost the ruling Bharatiya Janata party its parliamentary majority, according to researchers who tracked the vote.
The result handed India’s left-wing and regional opposition parties dozens of parliamentary seats and will leave Prime Minister Narendra Modi with a much weaker coalition government.
Modi said he would rely on his usual partners in the National Democratic Alliance, including regional parties such as Telugu Desam in India’s southern Telangana state and Shiv Sena in the western state of Maharashtra.
The BJP — which won the last two general elections outright — fell well short of the 272 seats needed for a majority in the 543-seat Lok Sabha, or lower house. With 240 parliamentary seats, down from the 303 it won in 2019, the BJP will rely on its allies far more than before.
Before the vote, Modi and his BJP colleagues targeted 400 seats for the NDA, but with results counted the alliance has only 293.
Analysts said some of the BJP’s campaign messaging about India’s rising economy and global status fell flat in a country where jobs are scarce and hundreds of millions rely on government handouts.
So who gained most from the loss in BJP support in this political realignment? The biggest “flip” for the opposition was the net 35 seats that went from the BJP to candidates from the Indian National Congress, the ruling party’s political arch-rival that used to dominate Indian politics. The BJP lost dozens more to other members of the opposition INDIA alliance, including 25 to the regional socialist Samajwadi party, which is based in the northern state of Uttar Pradesh where it suffered some of its biggest setbacks.
“In UP, it was about the government not recognising that there had been a K-shaped recovery after Covid,” said Shivam Shankar Singh, a political consultant and author, referring to the diverging prospects of rich and poor. “There’s a whole class of people who are dependent on government schemes and rations for survival, and they are not seeing much hope for the future.”
Indians sometimes describe UP as a “swing state” because of its political weight in elections, but any analogy with the US understates the importance of a region with more people than Pakistan or Brazil and elects 80 parliamentary seats. This year the BJP lost heavily there — even in Ayodhya, site of a Hindu temple whose consecration Modi presided over at the start of his campaign.
The BJP’s losses in its Hindi-speaking northern political heartland cost it its outright majority. Analysts said in northern states with large communities of farmers, who have repeatedly protested to demand government aid and guaranteed prices for their crops, many turned to Congress and its allies.
“Anti-incumbency was quite strong, and in any place that was touched by the farmers’ protests — Haryana, UP, Rajasthan — the BJP saw significant drops,” said Neelan Sircar, senior fellow with the Centre for Policy Research in New Delhi.
The BJP also lost seats in Maharashtra, India’s second-most populous state, where the ruling party engineered a takeover of the state government in 2022.
Among the BJP’s losses to regional parties were a net six seats to the opposition All India Trinamool Congress in West Bengal, and one seat to Janata Dal (United), an alliance partner based in Bihar whose head Nitish Kumar is being described as a kingmaker for Modi’s next government.
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