“PLAY THE COALITION GAME”
Commentators and exit polls had projected an overwhelming victory for Modi, who critics have accused of leading the jailing of opposition figures and trampling on the rights of India’s 200-million-plus Muslim community.
But the BJP secured 240 seats in parliament, well down from the 303 it won five years ago and 32 short of a majority on its own.
The main opposition Congress party won 99 seats in a remarkable turnaround, almost doubling its 2019 tally of 52.
“Today’s masters are not as strong as they were,” Christophe Jaffrelot, a professor at King’s College London, wrote in The Hindu daily on Thursday.
“For the first time in his political career, Narendra Modi will have to play the coalition game.”
Congress party president Mallikarjun Kharge said the result was a vote against Modi “and the substance and style of his politics”.
“It is a huge political loss for him personally, apart from being a clear moral defeat as well,” he told party leaders at an opposition alliance meeting.
In a personal sting, Modi was re-elected to his constituency representing the Hindu holy city of Varanasi with a far lower margin of 152,300 votes. That compared with nearly half a million votes five years ago.
“Elections expressed a yearning for the defence of constitutional values and citizen dignity,” Ashutosh Varshney, a political scientist at Brown University, wrote in the Indian Express on Thursday.
Varshney argued Modi’s setback reflected concerns about what the “idea of India” meant to voters – against a backdrop of a “rise of animosities and polarisation in society, people’s concern about rights and the steeply rising inequalities”.
