My takeaways from 2024 Indian General Elections

Belying all opinion poll and exit poll predictions, Indian voters have given the least expected mandate in the just concluded general elections. Here are my key takeaways from the results.

1) Between 2004 and 2014, Indian voters gave fractured mandates reducing the Indian National Congress (INC) from being a majoritarian party to making it dependent on its coalition partners to form governments. That fate has befallen in this election on the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) which had become the majoritarian party in the last 10 years.

2) BJP falling short of a simple majority is going to be hard to digest for Narendra Modi and Amit Shah. They will have to cater to the whims and fancies of their coalition partners to form the government now which is not going to sit well with them. Their aggressive personalities and penchant for strong arm tactics from the time they were at the helm of Gujarat politics means they may not be fit to manage the intricacies of a coalition government in the long term.

3) Modi’s time as the face of BJP is coming to an end. Everything that goes up has to come down some time. He may become the PM now but will no longer hold sway in the Parliament like he used to in the last 10 years especially with a united opposition bristling and sharpening its claws to attack him and block anything BJP wants to do. BJP needs a new face for the next election in 5 years which is not going to be easy at all. UP chief minister Yogi Adityanath was being projected to take over the mantle from Modi but the inroads opposition parties have made into BJP’s UP bastion in this election could erode that possibility significantly.

4) BJP thrived for 10 years in the belief that opposition parties could never come together. Even when the opposition parties formed a unified entity for the election BJP thinktank did not seem to have taken it seriously. Modi and Shah used police and investigating agencies against anyone opposing them to the point where they were all forced to join hands. It takes a pride of lions to bring down an elephant. Hitler was winning on the western front in World War II and had a peace pact albeit an uneasy one with Russia. Invading Russia, opening the eastern front and making enemies on both sides was what led to his downfall.

5) Everything that goes down will rise up some time. Rahul Gandhi was shamed, ridiculed and sent to jail to make him irrelevant in Indian politics. But he is having the last laugh now. His best strategy now would be to let BJP form a weak government with the support of Nitish Kumar and Chandrababu Naidu both of whom have walked away from BJP in the past, assume leadership of the opposition coalition and bring BJP down to its knees in the Parliament. This would be his road to the PM’s chair in 2029.

6) The time of coalition politics has finally arrived. Regional parties have become powerful enough to dictate who runs the central governments and how and this was to be expected to happen some time. In a hub-and-spoke model, the spokes can become mature enough to manage the hub together.