India’s election has delivered a shock result, with the incumbent Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) of Prime Minister Narendra failing to win the 272 seats needed in the Lok Sabha to secure a majority on its own.
Exit polls over the weekend claimed that Modi and the BJP were on track to scoring a rout, with over 400 seats. However, those projections turned out to be overly optimistic as the BJP has lost the majority in the Lok Sabha for the first time since 2014.
Despite this, Modi and the BJP are celebrating, as the National Democratic Alliance (NDA) led by the party has the numbers to form a government.
The opposition, led by the Congress party and the INDIA alliance, has managed to secure over 230 seats. Nearly 60 of these seats have been won from the BJP.
Anti-incumbency bias, voter apathy and strong youth unemployment all contributed to the BJP’s loss of electoral fortune. The party had managed to secure 303 seats in the 2019 election, but will have to settle for a tally closer to 240 in the current election.
Many of these losses came in Uttar Pradesh, India’s most populous province and part of the Hindi heartland, which the exit polls were projecting to lean heavily towards the BJP.
In a significant sign of the BJP’s loss of ground, the party lost the Faizabad seat in Uttar Pradesh, where the city of Ayodhya is located and where Prime Minister Modi inaugurated the Ram Temple earlier this year, on the grounds where the demolished Babri Mosque used to be.