India’s Modi faces ‘unprecedented’ alliance test after election results

Modi has only ever ruled with large majorities, centralised power and without coalition compulsions. Can he adapt? The answer could shape India’s next government, say analysts

New Delhi, India — For a decade, Prime Minister Narendra Modi and his Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) have insisted that they represent a “new India” – one free from the nepotism often associated with family-run parties that dominate the opposition, and the corruption that tainted previous governments.

On Wednesday, the world’s largest democracy woke up to a different “new India”, one where the BJP had lost the commanding majority it had led the country with for the past decade, triggering a political scramble to assemble the nation’s next government.

Leaders of both the BJP-led National Democratic Alliance (NDA) and the opposition INDIA alliance rushed to New Delhi, as they separately huddled to plot the next steps in a political drama that no exit poll had predicted after India’s seven-phase election concluded on June 1.

Defying projections of a landslide win for the BJP and NDA after the final round of voting on June 1 in India’s mammoth election, the INDIA alliance managed to win 232 seats in the election to the Lok Sabha, India’s lower house of parliament. The BJP still emerged as India’s largest party, with 240 seats, but that number falls well short of the 272 needed for a majority.

On Wednesday, the BJP’s biggest allies in the NDA, including the Telugu Desam Party (TDP) from the southern state of Andhra Pradesh and the Janata Dal (United) – also known as the JD(U) – from the state of Bihar, pledged support to the BJP and Modi. Modi was “unanimously elected as the leader of the NDA” at the meeting of the NDA, the BJP said in a statement on X.