Narendra Modi takes oath as PM for 3.0
President Droupadi Murmu administered the oath of office to the Prime Minister; His ministerial colleagues were also sworn in
image for illustrative purpose
New Delhi: Prime Minister Narendra Modi was sworn in for a third consecutive term at the Rashtrapati Bhavan here on Sunday.
President Droupadi Murmu administered the oath of office to the Prime Minister. Modi, 73, first became prime minister in 2014 and then returned to office in 2019. Top leaders from India’s neighbourhood and the Indian Ocean region were special guests at the function. His ministerial colleagues also took oath on this occasion.
Narendra Modi scripted history as he became the first non-Congress leader and second after Jawaharlal Nehru to achieve the feat of securing a third straight term that few thought possible for a BJP leader until he shook up national politics in 2014.
His third term, which always appeared inevitable, did not come with the massive mandate he and his party had been claiming with their typical bravado, as the Congress and its allies in the INDIA bloc fought a doughty rearguard battle to shock the BJP in its strongholds like Uttar Pradesh and Rajasthan. It is, however, a tribute to his towering political presence that the BJP’s third-best tally of 240 seats is being seen as a disappointment by the party’s ardent supporters and projected as a “moral defeat” by the Congress whose own tally of 99 seats, its third worst, is being hailed by the opposition party.
The BJP-led National Democratic Alliance has won 293 seats, which Modi has noted is the biggest success for any pre-poll alliance when a single party did not get a majority. Despite the challenges thrown by the polls, Modi remains the fulcrum around which Indian politics is bound to revolve in the coming years, while he himself will have to negotiate the sharp bends and blind turns of coalition politics for the first time since he entered the electoral politics as Gujarat chief minister in 2001. Since leading the BJP for the first time in the Gujarat assembly polls in 2002, held in the shadow of the riots in the state following the Godhra train burning incident, Modi has never looked back, remaking the substance and sentiments of politics like few before him. While his detractors had written him off politically in 2002, he has gone from strength to strength, becoming a winning mix of Hindutva and development for his party.
