Modi’s BJP loses majority in India election shock, needs allies for gov’t

Defying exit polls, opposition parties stun the BJP in vital states, resetting India’s political landscape.

New Delhi, India — Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) lost its national majority after suffering major losses in key states, marking a dramatic shift in a political landscape it has dominated for the past decade.

The BJP emerged, comfortably, as the country’s single-largest party in the Lok Sabha, the lower house of India’s parliament. But with most votes counted after India’s six-week-long election on Tuesday, the BJP was well short of its performances from 2014 and 2019.

Unlike both those elections, when the BJP won clear majorities on its own in a house of 543 seats, it was poised to end up with 240 seats this time around. The halfway mark is 272 seats.

By contrast, the opposition INDIA alliance, led by the Congress party, was projected to win more than 200 seats, significantly higher than exit polls had predicted. Released on June 1 after the final phase of India’s election cycle, the exit polls had suggested that the BJP would outdo its 2019 tally of 303 seats.

Modi and his party are still likely to be able to form India’s next government — but will be dependent on a clutch of allies whose support they will need to cross the 272-seat mark. The BJP with its allies, in a coalition known as the National Democratic Alliance (NDA), was projected to win around 282 seats.

“India will likely have an NDA government, where the BJP does not have a majority on their own, and coalition politics will come into real play,” said Sandeep Shastri, the national coordinator of the Lokniti Network, a research programme at the New Delhi-based Centre for the Study of Developing Societies (CSDS).

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