Suddenly, the aura of invincibility around Narendra Modi was shattered.
In an Indian election in which his party’s slogan had promised a landslide victory and where Mr. Modi even repeatedly called himself sent by God, the results announced Tuesday were, against all odds, sobering.
Mr. Modi, 73, appears to have secured a third consecutive term as prime minister, a feat only one other Indian leader has accomplished, and his Bharatiya Janata Party, or BJP, won far more seats than any other left.
But instead of a landslide victory, the BJP lost dozens of seats. He now finds himself at the mercy of coalition partners – including a politician known for frequently switching sides – to stay in power, a stark reversal a decade into Mr. Modi’s transformational term.
When the results were announced, the country’s stock markets plunged. Opposition parties, newly united in what they call an effort to save the country’s democracy, rejoiced. And India, while extending Mr. Modi’s firm grip on power, learned that there are limits to his political power, even as he contested elections, usually fought seat by seat, squarely for himself.
Mr Modi took a more positive view in a statement on X declaring that his coalition had won a third term. “This is a historic feat in Indian history,” he said.
For Mr. Modi, a generous interpretation of the result could mean that only with his personal efforts can his party overcome its unpopularity at the local level and come out on top. Or it could be that his carefully cultivated brand has now reached its peak and he can no longer outrun the anti-incumbency sentiment that eventually catches up with almost all politicians.
It is uncertain how Mr. Modi will respond: whether he will redouble his efforts to fend off any challenges to his power, or whether he will be rebuked by the voters’ verdict and his need to work with coalition partners who do not share its Hindu-nationalist ideology.
“Modi is not known as a consensus figure. However, he is very pragmatic,” said Arati Jerath, a New Delhi-based political analyst. “He will have to moderate his uncompromising and Hindu nationalist approach to issues. Perhaps we can hope for more moderation from him.”
Few doubt, however, that Mr. Modi will attempt to deepen his already considerable footprint on the country over the next five years.
Under his leadership, India, the world’s most populous country, enjoyed new prominence on the global stage, overhauled its infrastructure to meet the needs of its 1.4 billion people and imbibed of a new sense of ambition as it attempts to shed the legacy of its long colonial past.
At the same time, Mr. Modi has worked to transform a highly diverse country, united by a secular democratic system, into an openly Hindu state, marginalizing the country’s large Muslim minority.
His increasingly authoritarian turn – with a crackdown on dissent that has created a frightening environment of self-censorship – has brought India’s vociferous democracy closer to a one-party state, his critics say. And the country’s economic growth, although rapid, has mainly enriched the richest.
Mr. Modi came from a humble background as the son of a tea seller, becoming India’s most powerful and popular leader in decades by building a cult of personality, spending heavily on infrastructure and social protection and tilting Indian democratic institutions in its favor.
The ultimate goal was to consolidate his position as one of the most important prime ministers in India’s nearly 75-year republic and establish the BJP as the country’s only plausible national governing force.
But Tuesday’s results indicated a sharp turnaround for India’s main opposition party, the Indian National Congress, which many saw as irrevocably weakened after heavy defeats in the previous two elections.
The once-dominant Congress, long positioned at India’s political center, has struggled for years to find direction and offer an ideological alternative to the BJP. But he and his coalition partners have found traction this election by attacking Mr. Modi’s government on issues such as unemployment, social justice and the prime minister’s ties to Indian billionaires.
Last year, as Rahul Gandhi, the public face of the Congress party, sought to burnish his image by leading long marches across India, the BJP ensnared him in a court case that led to his trial. expulsion from Parliament. He was subsequently re-elected to his seat by India’s highest court and is expected to be re-elected on Tuesday.
Speaking as the first returns came in, Mr Gandhi, 53, said the fight was not just against the BJP. She was also, he said, against all government institutions that had stood with Mr. Modi to try to paralyze the opposition through arrests and attacks. other punitive measures.
“It was about saving the Constitution,” he said, lifting a small copy he had with him and which he had displayed during his speeches during the election campaign.
Exit polls released Saturday, after more than six weeks of voting in the world’s largest democratic exercise, indicated that Mr. Modi’s party was heading for an easy victory. But there had been signs during the campaign that Mr Modi worried about the result.
He crisscrossed the country at more than 200 rallies in about two months and gave dozens of interviews, hoping to use his charisma to mask his party’s weaknesses. In his speeches, he often deviated from his party’s message that rising India to counter accusations that it favored corporations and caste elites. He has also abandoned his once-subtle dog whistles targeting India’s 200 million Muslims. directly demonize themname.
As things stand, by nightfall Mr Modi would need at least 33 seats among his allies to cross the minimum of 272 to form a government.
Two regional parties in particular are said to be kingmakers: the Telugu Desam Party in the southern state of Andhra Pradesh, with 16 seats, and the Janata Dal (United) Party in the southern state of Bihar. is, with 12.
Both parties are conspicuously secular, raising hopes among Mr. Modi’s opponents that their influence could slow his race to transform India’s democracy into a Hindu state.
Some of Mr. Modi’s biggest losses have been in India’s most populous state, Uttar Pradesh, in the north, with about 240 million people. His party leads the state government and won 62 of the state’s 80 seats in the lower house of the national Parliament in the previous election, in 2019.
As the count entered its final stretch on Tuesday evening, the BJP was in the lead with just 33 seats. In his own constituency, Varanasi, Mr. Modi’s margin of victory was reduced from half a million last time to around 150,000.
The defeat in Faizabad constituency, in particular, shows how some of the prime minister’s biggest bids have struggled to reach voters.
The constituency is home to the sumptuous temple of Aries in Ayodhya, built on land disputed between Hindus and Muslims. Its construction was the cornerstone of the nearly century-old Hindu nationalist movement that brought Mr. Modi to power. He hoped his grand inauguration just before the start of the election campaign would both unite his Hindu support base and attract new supporters into the fold.
Some BJP workers said the party’s display of the temple could have made a large section of Hindus at the bottom of the rigid caste hierarchy uncomfortable. The opposition had portrayed Mr. Modi as pursuing an upper-caste agenda that denied disadvantaged Hindus the opportunity to reverse centuries of oppression.
“Because of the excessive focus on the Ram temple issue, the opposition has united,” said Subhash Punia, 62, a farmer from Rajasthan state who supports Mr. Modi and was waiting outside on Tuesday the BJP headquarters in Delhi.
To offset potential losses in his northern bastion, where people speak Hindi, Mr. Modi had set himself an ambitious goal for this election: to gain a foothold in the country’s more prosperous south.
He broke new ground in Kerala, a state dominated by the political left and long hostile to its ideology. But across the south, he struggled to improve on the 29 seats, out of 129, that his party won in the previous election.
Perhaps the BJP’s biggest disappointment in south India is that once again it appears to have won none of the 40 seats in Tamil Nadu, a state with its own strong cultural and linguistic identity.
Mr. Modi had campaigned aggressively there, even traveling to a coastal town for two days of meditation as voting drew to a close.
“Mr. Modi and the BJP’s antics cannot win my Tamil heart,” said S. Ganesan, a waiter at a hotel in Kanniyakumari, the town Mr. Modi visited.
Mujib Mashal, Alex Travelli, Hari Kumar And Samir Yasir reported from New Delhi, Suhasini Raj from Varanasi, India, and Pragati KB from Bangalore, India.
