Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s National Democratic Alliance (NDA) formally named him on Wednesday to lead a new coalition government for a third straight term, a day after it regained power with a surprisingly slim majority (the NDA won 293 seats in the 543-member lower house of parliament, more than the 272 needed to form a government).

The body language of Modi said it all; he appeared dejected and forlorn. In other words, Modi had an “emotional moment” in his first address after the Lok Sabha election results.

Modi’s BJP has won 240 seats on its own as the party has failed to reach the magical 272-seat number on its own. Now Modi will be depending a lot on the BJP’s coalition partners to run the government. The “Godi media”, a euphemism for pro-BJP or pro-government media led by Arnab Goswami, is still in a state of shock for it had been claiming day in and day out that the BJP alone would grab more than 400 seats in the 2024 elections.

It is important to note that the ruling party has suffered a lot of humiliation in the country’s largest state or province, UP, in particular. It is the state where Rahul Gandhi’s personal assistant Kishori Lal Sharma defeated BJP’s Smriti Irani on the Amethi seat with a very big margin, enabling the Indian Congress to regain its bastion. It is said that anger over jobs and fears of Dalits and Muslims worked against the BJP.

It was actually Samajwadi Party (SP) that cashed in on this opportunity by displaying comprehensive understanding of UP caste politics maths. It eventually emerged as the largest party by winning 37 out of 80 UP Lok Sabha seats. In West Bengal, Mamata Banerjee of TMC successfully reduced the BJP to just 12 seats from the 18 they won in 2019. She has proved that Bengal is hers again.

Mehdi Hasan

Karachi

Copyright Business Recorder, 2024