India ‘shining’ takes a beating after Modi loses ‘aura of invincibility’

The Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) entered the 2004 Lok Sabha elections with high expectations of being brought back to power on the back of its first five-year term in office. Its campaign slogan was ‘India Shining.’ Although, opinion polls forecast a comfortable victory, the eventual results were a massive shock as the BJP was voted out; it was to spend the next decade on the opposition benches in the House. Well, 2024 is not 2004 as the BJP remains in power. Even as the party carries out a post-mortem and turns its attention to major state elections later this year, the other question that will start to bubble up as people begin to assess the 73-year-old Narendra Modi’s third term as prime minister will be: Who comes next? The BJP has run headlong into a second ‘India Shining’ moment, exactly two decades after the first one. With opinion polls and the popular narrative suggesting a BJP win as a foregone conclusion, Modi’s party went into the 2024 elections brimming with confidence. After the final day of voting concluded, exit polls suggested that the numbers were in sight – only to see all those projections fail when the score came in: just 240 seats for the BJP, 32 below the majority mark, and much lower than its 303 seats in 2019 and 283 in 2014.

Its allies ultimately picked up enough seats for Modi to still have the numbers to return to power in a coalition government, but the image of the party and his own reputation were severely dented. For the first time in his electoral career, the Prime Minister was dependent on other parties to preserve his majority. More strikingly, the BJP dropped seats not just in non-Hindi speaking states like Maharashtra, West Bengal, and Karnataka, but also in the core ‘heartland’ state of Uttar Pradesh – often seen as a key staging ground of the BJP’s religious and language-based politics. While the party somewhat compensated for its losses by expanding into new territory in southern and eastern states, data suggests that its vote share was reduced in almost 274 of the 399 seats it contested. Evidently, Modi’s star power, which fueled the BJP’s incredible rise and dominance in the last decade, has dimmed. The Opposition’s surprising success, despite those circumstances, explains why many in the INDIA bloc are in a celebratory mood despite the fact that Modi had retained power.

As several observers put it, though there may be continuity in government – and indeed, the portfolios for the new Council of Ministers and Cabinet display little change from the preceding line-up – the more impactful outcome was the shattering of Modi’s ‘aura of invincibility’, not least because referee institutions, like the Election Commission of India, might enjoy more space to assert themselves under a coalition setup. In the immediate aftermath of the surprising results, the internet was filled with memes and commentary suggesting that the ruling party’s allies might act as a major check on Modi’s centralizing tendencies or his propensity for unilateral action – a reading that is now receiving some pushback.