India’s Modi is known for charging hard. After a lackluster election, he may have to adapt his style

NEW DELHI (AP) — Since coming to power a decade ago, Prime Minister Narendra Modi has been known for big, bold and often snap decisions that he’s found easy to execute thanks to the brute majority he enjoyed in India’s lower house of parliament.

In 2016, he yanked over 80% of bank notes from circulation in an effort to curb tax evasion that sent shockwaves through the country and devastated citizens who lost money. In 2019, his government pushed through a controversial law that stripped the special status of disputed, Muslim-majority Kashmir with hardly any debate in parliament. And in 2020, Modi swiftly brought in contentious agriculture reforms — though he was forced to drop those about a year later after mass protests from farmers.

In his expected next term as prime minister — when he will need a coalition to govern after results announced Wednesday showed his Hindu nationalist party fell short of a majority — Modi may have to adapt to a style of governance he has little experience with, or desire for.

And it’s not clear how that will play out.

“Negotiating and forming a coalition, working with coalition partners, grappling with the tradeoffs that come with coalition politics — none of this fits in well with Modi’s brand of assertive and go-it-alone politics,” said Michael Kugelman, director of the Wilson Center’s South Asia Institute.

The surprising election results upended widespread expectations before the vote and exit polls that suggested a stronger showing for Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party. In the end, the party won 240 seats — short of the 272 needed to form the government on its own. But the coalition it belongs to, the National Democratic Alliance, secured a majority in the 543-seat lower house that should allow