Modi won the Indian election. So why does it seem like he lost?

Narendra Modi will be sworn in for his third term as India’s prime minister on Sunday after winning the post again in India’s momentous 2024 elections. But this week’s elections delivered a shocking blow to Modi’s dominance and will likely curb his autocratic tendencies. 

There was never any serious doubt that Modi would remain in the top spot; he faced no credible opposition during the last two elections. And heading into this year’s six-week-long staggered election, he was widely expected to further consolidate his hold over Indian politics. 

But surprisingly, he did not: Not only did Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) lose a huge number of parliamentary seats to a revitalized opposition coalition, but it also lost big in states where it has enjoyed massive popularity, including Uttar Pradesh, India’s most populous state. Modi campaigned on a promise to win more than 400 seats, which would have given his coalition more than enough power to amend the constitution, which requires a two-thirds majority, or 362 seats. Even though he won this year’s contest, he has for now failed in his ambition to further consolidate power.

And that has real consequences: He’ll likely face new constraints on his increasingly authoritarian leadership thanks to a renewed opposition coalition — and possibly from within his own coalition, too.

Modi is still a popular politician, but the BJP has failed to deliver on an economic front for many Indians, from farmers to young university graduates. “It seems clear that one thing that the opposition did very well was put the attention on things like unemployment and inflation,” Rohini Pande, director of the Economic Growth Center at Yale University, told Vox. 

Modi has “been in power for 10 years,” Milan Vaishnav, director of the South Asia program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, told Vox. “He made some pretty lofty promises. And running on the cult of personality after 10 years is harder to do than it was the first time around or the second time around … There’s no dominant kind of emotive issue in the ether. People are kind of asking, ‘Well, what have you done for me lately?’”

That kind of messaging — about people’s material concerns, rather than the Hindu nationalism and cult of personality that characterized the Modi and BJP campaigns — helped propel the once-dominant Congress Party, led by political scion Rahul Gandhi, and its coalition partners to surprising victories in parliament and throughout the country. 

It’s too early to tell whether these elections will move the country away from the Hindutva, or the Hindu supremacist ideology that the BJP has championed; the opposition coalition is untested and could prove to be fractious and fragile. And, again, Modi still won, as evidenced by his upcoming inauguration on Sunday. But the bigger picture is that, at least for now, the Indian electorate is pushing back against his authoritarian and populist policies and re-entrenching the democratic principles, including secularism, on which its constitution is based.

The BJP’s stronghold has traditionally been in poorer northern states, like Rajasthan and Uttar Pradesh (UP for short), which is India’s most populous state and has the most seats in the Lok Sabha, the equivalent of the US House of Representatives. That made the BJP’s massive loss in UP perhaps the biggest surprise of the election. Going into the contest, many experts believed there was no way Modi and his party could lose the state where it fulfilled an existential Hindu nationalist goal, constructing a temple for the god Ram on the remains of the Babri Masjid, a storied mosque destroyed by rioters in 1992. That riot, tacitly sanctioned by local authorities, boosted the profile of the BJP and led to a decades-long court fight about whether the Ram Mandir could be constructed. In the face of protests, Modi consecrated the temple earlier this year.

The BJP also lost seats in Maharashtra, the coastal state home to Mumbai — one of India’s most politically and economically important cities — as well as the agricultural states of Haryana, Rajasthan, and Punjab. Those three states have been rocked by extensive farmers’ protests which have severely damaged Modi’s credibility there. 

But the party’s loss in UP is the most symbolically and politically significant of all; in terms of American politics, it would be similar to former President Donald Trump losing Texas or Florida in this year’s coming election. 

“Losing UP meant that he dropped below the majority mark, majority number” of parliamentary seats in the Lok Sabha, Ashutosh Varshney, director of the Saxena Center for Contemporary South Asia at Brown University, told Vox. “The UP was critical for that.” 

Inflation and lack of job creation primarily drove BJP’s losses, Paul Kenny, professor of political science at Australian Catholic University, told Vox.

“So like Trump, in a way, he really took a hit with Covid,” he said. “Inflation has really kind of gone through the roof, and employment — especially urban unemployment and youth unemployment — has also [been a] reason. So when you look at inflation of about 6 percent, and food inflation of even higher, maybe 8 percent, that really affects the poor. And inflation in particular, is a really strong indicator of incumbent reelection success, especially in developing countries.”

But there were other problems, including concerns that Muslims and people from marginalized castes had about their constitutional protections under Modi. The BJP’s tactic of silencing critics via arrests and threats may have begun to wear on people, though it’s not clear how much that influenced their choices in the polling booth. 

“This qualifies as a climate of fear,” Varshney said. “But the climate of fear is not such that it would stop them from going to the polling booth. No, they’ll go and vote. What it’s doing is impeding the conversation before that.” That climate of fear may have contributed to the surprise results — politicians and pollsters couldn’t predict that people would vote against the BJP because they weren’t saying so aloud. 

Gandhi’s campaign filtered voters’ concerns — about the economy, their rights, and massive inequality — through the lens of the constitution. The opposition made the argument that if the BJP won a majority in the parliament, it would make unfavorable constitutional amendments, Varshney said. “In every rally — every single rally — Rahul Gandhi had a copy of the constitution in his hands.”

That concern may have driven many voters from marginalized castes away from the BJP because they have certain rights and protections under the constitution. Groups like the Dalits, OBCs (Other Backwards Castes), and Scheduled Tribes — typically, though not always, still part of India’s Hindu majority — had been socially oppressed and suffered from a lack of educational and job opportunities, as well as political representation. India’s democratic constitution guarantees a measure of rights and opportunities, including representation quotas in politics, for these groups. Though the BJP had previously managed to unite Hindus as a political bloc across castes with its Hindutva policies, the opposition exploitation of caste politics may have had a significant impact in UP. 

Overall, the BJP lost 63 of the seats it previously held in the Lok Sabha. That means that, although the BJP still has the most seats of any party in the lower house of parliament, it doesn’t have a majority. Together with its coalition partners, the BJP still has a 293-seat majority, but that’s not enough to make constitutional amendments unchallenged. Modi and the BJP will now encounter more friction — both from the opposition and potentially from within the coalition it formed as an insurance policy during the campaign.

The BJP campaigned in coalition with two regional secular parties, the Telugu Desam Party (TDP) and Janata Dal (United), or JDU, forming the National Democratic Alliance (NDA) party​​. How they will govern together under Modi, however, remains to be seen.

The leadership of the TDP and JDU parties don’t see eye to eye with Modi on some fairly important issues. Nitish Kumar of the JDU party wants to conduct a caste census across the country (something the opposition INDIA coalition has also advocated for) which would give the government a better idea of how to distribute resources, programs, and political representation for marginalized castes especially. But that turn to caste politics threatens Modi’s message of cross-caste Hindu solidarity against other groups. The TDP leadership has also promised to reserve protections and rights for Muslims in the states of Telangana and Andhra Pradesh — something that Modi previously promised to abolish. 

That could make the NDA coalition fragile, and Modi’s desire to remain in power gives a fair amount of leverage to JDU and TDP to extract demands for their states from the central government.

“Modi now will go back to having to depend on a lot of regional partners and state parties,” Kenny said. “And the BJP, even at its height of Modi’s ability to bring in votes with charisma, was still dependent on buying the support of smaller coalitions — so being able to dispense goods, to dispense patronage, to effectively buy votes by distributing. Whether it’s things [like] rations and fuel support, and all of these kinds of things that go on in daily politics in India. That’s just come back to the fore.”

Furthermore, because there is now a fulsome opposition party, “the parliament will once again become a site for vigorous debate and contestation,” Varshney said. The BJP will not be able to push through laws as they did with recent criminal code reforms without debate.

But the opposition coalition is untested, and could become fractious over time, too, Vaishnav said. “These are parties which have been at each other’s throats, and who are highly competitive with one another in states where they have a real presence. And they’ve managed to let bygones be bygones, for the purposes of fighting this election. But when the electoral spotlight is off, will they be able to continue this method of collaboration and cooperation [having] achieved the short-term objective?”

This election, while pivotal, is far from the end of the BJP or Modi, Vaishnav said. “[Modi] is an incredibly crafty savvy marketer and politician who has an incredible amount of charisma and a reservoir of goodwill amongst the people.”

Populist and personality-driven politics are trending upward all around the world, partly because of a decline in traditional political parties and the institutions that support them, Kenny said. Modi’s just part of that wave. But this year’s election demonstrated that the trend toward populism and authoritarianism — in democratic societies, anyway — has its limits.