Abstract
The importance of elections and their outcomes need no repetition. That makes it only natural for Studies in Indian Politics to devote a special section to the discussion of the outcome of the latest elections. This is in continuation of similar special sections/sets of articles following the 2014 and 2019 elections to the Lok Sabha.
In the case of India, parliamentary elections not only produce new governments, but they are often purported to have given a ‘mandate’ to some party and/or leader. Since the rise of the Narendra Modi-led Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) in 2014, this idea of the mandate has become all the more glamorous because of the deep effect leadership had on the outcome and also because of the return of single majority governments after a gap of three decades (the Congress government elected in 1984 was the last one with a majority of one party, until in 2014, the BJP achieved that feat). It is another matter that elections in democracies do not offer a mandate—at least not often. More often, elections only offer different choices, locally and nationally, to the voters and thus allow the formation of a new government. With the electoral contest becoming more intense and the campaign showing signs of a more competitive election, the 2024 election was keenly watched for the extent of support the BJP could retain/garner. As it turned out, the election did prove to be far more competitive than the previous two parliamentary elections. Moreover, it was certainly not an election that ‘gave a mandate’.
Even then, the 18th parliamentary elections held critical importance for three reasons. First, after 10 years of relative weakness, the Congress party was again making an effort to survive deadly blows extended by the previous two elections. This was coupled with the efforts to proffer a semblance of an alternative bloc to take the place of the BJP. This had implications for the party system. Second, the BJP, the ruling party for the last decade, was making a pitch for expanding its political reach across states and social sections. It sought to entrench itself as the truly dominant party of India. This too had implications for the continuation of the ‘second dominant party system’ (Palshikar, 2017) that emerged post-2014. Third, after Jawaharlal Nehru, for the first time, a prime minister was looking forward to winning a third term under his leadership in a consecutive third election. In doing so, Narendra Modi did not only want to make history but to ensure that he continued to be the only leader today to win an election for his party. In other words, his personal ability to fetch votes against all odds was at stake in the 2024 election. But more than personal ability and fame, this had relevance to the way people were expected to make choices. The popularity of Modi meant that limitations of governance would be ignored by the voters and also that ideas represented by Modi—whether development or Hindutva—would matter more than anything else.
From an entirely different perspective, 2024 was an important moment in India’s democratic politics because of ongoing discussions about the narrowing of democratic space in the country. These debates dovetailed with the broader global concerns over the health of democracy and the rise of strongmen as leaders. On the one hand, the rise of personal leadership as the central factor has been a dominant theme for many societies. This theme subsumes—is dominated by—the idea that such leadership often tends to be populist and inclined to employ an authoritarian style to sustain its popularity. On the other hand, institutional resilience has been under the cloud as a result of either populist or majoritarian tendencies. If the BJP were to perform more handsomely than it did in 2024, these issues would have become central to analyses of electoral outcomes.
As it happened, the 2024 elections threw up an enigmatic outcome. While everyone—the ruling party and its detractors—could claim some victory (and thus, the elections saw a diversification of power across parties—see Shastri et al., 2024), the fact remains that the outcome fell short of either endorsing the BJP’s politics of the last 10 years or replacing it with a new government. The BJP lost the majority in Lok Sabha, but it nevertheless managed to retain the bulk of its electoral support from 2019. This clearly was a case of not having clear winners, and though the BJP did lose the election in the sense of loss of majority, there still were no clear losers either. This ambivalence prompts the question whether politics did change substantially, whether the social coalition that had stood behind the BJP since 2014 crumbled and whether the elections indicate the downslide of the BJP after its rather dramatic upsurge 10 years ago.
In terms of social demographics, the elections of 2024 did not witness any dramatic shifts. The BJP held on to its electoral strengths among different Hindu caste groups (Ahmed, 2024). This meant that the ‘Hindu umbrella’ that is strong and thick in its support to the BJP from upper and middle castes as well as many other backward classes has not withered much. This umbrella is however fragile at its peripheries—spatially, the BJP is not as strong in most of the areas outside of the Hindi heartland. It is fragile at the margins of social power structures—scheduled castes, rural voters and low-income groups are sections that witness less convincing support for the BJP. But these trends already pre-existed in this election. In spite of the Hindu umbrella, however, the BJP lost seats and majority.
In terms of overall vote too, BJP held on to its vote share with a small depletion of under 1%. Yet, the BJP lost seats. This happened because the BJP expanded its vote share in areas where it already had optimum seats or in areas where it did not get seats proportionate to its vote. In technical terms, this indicates the inefficiency of the BJP’s vote to get converted into seats—a political failure. Thus, the ‘multiplier’, that is, the factor that indicated conversion of votes into seats, became thin this time compared to 2019. It had reached its peak in 2014: for each 1% vote that the BJP polled then, it won 1.7% seats in the Lok Sabha. This multiplier factor of 1.7 declined slightly in 2019, coming down to 1.5. But an increase in vote share at that time meant that the BJP posted its most handsome victory so far in the elections of 2019. In 2024, the BJP failed to retain the same vote share as last time and also failed to post the same conversion rate. It achieved a lower multiplier of 1.2 and lost clear majority in the Lok Sabha. Though it formed a government in alliance with its partners from the National Democratic Alliance, in terms of seats, votes and a clear majority, it lost the elections. The majority of the papers in this section try to address the complex nature of the outcome and identify factors that may have contributed to it.
Did the BJP lose its nearly acquired dominance of the political process? In strictly numeric terms, the BJP may have faced a loss of its dominance, but to the extent it did not allow the opposition to nudge it out of power, its dominance continued to characterize the competition among parties. The 15% point difference between the BJP and its nearest competitor, the huge gap between the BJP’s 240 seats vis-à-vis the Congress’ 99 and the inability of the Congress to make gains in strong BJP states like Gujarat or Madhya Pradesh indicate the dominance of the BJP. Besides, the BJP, in spite of its losses, retained its hold over key states and made deep inroads in Odisha, Telangana, Tamil Nadu and Kerala. This can hardly be seen as a loss of dominance. In this sense, there is an enigmatic character to the outcome.
This ambiguity of the outcome will remain a topic of political polemic as well as of serious analysis for the time to come. But before such analyses of the meaning and implications of India’s 2024 elections commence, it is necessary to sketch the factors that shaped the outcome. In most part, that is what the special section does. Essays in this section may be seen as a continuation of the insights and arguments presented in this journal’s issue of December 2023. In that issue, we presented long-term trends based on survey data. It would be noteworthy that many of those trends have not altered.
In most part, all essays here draw from the National Election Study of 2024 undertaken by Lokniti. This study had two parts. There was an all-India survey conducted about 2 weeks before the voting for the election commenced (a pre-poll). This was followed by another all-India survey after voting was concluded in each phase (post-poll; for the methodology of both these, see
The essay by Hilal Ahmed and Christophe Jaffrelot engages with the question of perceptions among India’s Muslim minority and its vote choice. This should be of great importance to those looking at the question of majoritarianism. While the fact that Muslims have so far desisted from voting for the BJP is well-documented along with its nuanced variations (Alam, 2023), the discussion of Muslim perceptions of themselves may throw more light on how a majoritarian political ethos affects the minority community.
We are aware that there are gaps in the subjects covered in this special section—particularly about how religiosity shapes politics and about the slow but steady progress of majoritarianism. While majoritarianism did not expand phenomenally between 2014 and 2019, it did constitute a critical element in shaping and affecting contemporary democratic politics in India (Palshikar, 2022). Continuously since 2014, the proportion of respondents subscribing to the view that ‘in a democracy, will of majority community should prevail’ has remained steady at around 50%—though compared to 2014, those agreeing fully with this statement have declined in numbers (from 30% to around 20%). The majoritarian tendency also has a clear partisan location. In this election, among those who fully agree that the ‘will of majority community should prevail’, 47% reported voting for the BJP, while among those who fully disagree, 26% voted for the BJP—a 10% point difference either way from the BJP’s average vote share. Clearly, there is an urgent need to further analyse these issues and their relevance to voting choices.
Another area not attended to in this special section is the nature of the party system. It is necessary to explore the nature of the party system and the nature of coalitions, as they have evolved during the past decade. Three arguments have been made in this regard. One, as we mentioned above, the argument is made that India is witnessing another round of a dominant party system. This argument is also accompanied by another argument about the stranglehold that the BJP enjoys over the realm of ideas and how the public sphere is shaped contemporarily. This refers to the BJP’s hegemony (Palshikar, 2019; also Vaishnav, 2024, who has argued that the BJP has inaugurated a ‘new republic’ consisting of illiberal democracy). The third argument is about the role and (continued) importance of state parties (Tillin, 2015). The 2024 elections have in a sense invited proponents of all these three arguments to rework their propositions. As discussed above, we have entered an era of truncated or incomplete dominance (though in the case of Congress’ dominance, too, it was always punctuated by many challenges even during its heyday). The loss of majority for the BJP similarly asks questions about how the BJP will now push its hegemonic project in the backdrop of its reduced numeric strength. While state parties have returned to the centre stage both in government and in opposition, it remains to be seen what role they perform in a BJP-dominated coalition and, at the same time, if state parties can constitute the bulwark against the BJP in states where the Congress is weak or non-existent.
Unless these issues are analysed, the election outcome and its more long-term political implications might not be easy to unravel. We hope that Studies in Indian Politics will be able to fill these and other gaps through future articles that focus on these research areas.