Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi, right, speaks with Chief Minister of Uttar Pradesh state Yogi Adityanath during an election campaign rally in Meerut, India (Photo: AP/File Photo)
Vote counting is underway in India’s 2024 Lok Sabha election, the world’s largest election. Voters are choosing 543 members for the lower house of Parliament for a five-year term.
The polls are seen as a test for India’s democratic and secular traditions, which critics say have seen a slow erosion under Narendra Modi’s 10-year rule. It also tests the limits of a populist leader who has risen to power by mixing religion with politics on a Hindu-first platform.
India’s clout on the global stage has risen under Modi. It’s seen by Western nations as a counterweight to Chinese aggression in the region even as New Delhi maintains its historic ties with Russia. And its large economy, one of the fastest growing in the world, has only boosted its rise as an emerging global power.
Early leads from India’s election commission projected Narendra Modi’s ruling Bharatiya Janata Party was leading in 25 of 26 seats in the prime minister’s home state of Gujarat.
The 53-year-old is the scion of modern India’s most powerful political dynasty. He is the great-grandson of the country’s first Prime Minister, Jawaharlal Nehru. His grandmother and father also held the top job and were each assassinated.
He is the star face for the opposition Congress party, which governed India for nearly 55 years after the country gained independence from the British in 1947. This time, he and his Congress party are leading the main opposition alliance, called INDIA, against Narendra Modi’s BJP.
While his family connections have helped retain some loyal voters, they have also worked against him — especially in the past two elections, where he suffered huge losses against Modi, who refers to Gandhi as an out-of-touch elite, coasting on his surname.
On the campaign trail, Gandhi has called Modi a dictator ruining India’s democracy. He has attacked Modi and the BJP over recent anti-Muslim rhetoric. And his party is hoping to benefit from economic distress, including high unemployment.
Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s ruling Hindu nationalist party appears to be falling short of a majority in the early vote count. If these trends hold, it would be a stunning setback to the populist who has never relied on coalition partners to govern.
Modi’s party is still expected to form the government and return as the prime minister for a rare third consecutive term as his National Democratic Alliance was leading in about 290 constituencies — ahead of the 272 seats needed for a majority. Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party alone was leading in 242 seats.
A coalition would, however, diminish Modi’s power as a strongman leader who won his party landslide victories in 2014 and 2019 elections.
In such a scenario, his BJP would likely “be heavily dependent on the goodwill of its allies, which makes them critical players who we can expect will extract their pound of flesh, both in terms of policymaking as well as government formation,” said Milan Vaishnav, director of the South Asia Program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.
“This would be truly, you know, uncharted territory, both for Indians as well as for the prime minister,” Vaishnav said.
Since coming to power in 2014, Modi’s BJP has governed in a coalition government but has always held a majority on its own.
As hundreds of millions headed to the polls, they did so amid sweltering heat and unpredictable weather extremes worsened by human-caused climate change. That climate change has led to losses of livelihood, forced migration and increasingly difficult living conditions.
India’s top political parties made promises to address climate change and reduce emissions in their election manifestos — but little of that was evident on the campaign trail.
A politician from disputed Kashmir who has been in New Delhi’s Tihar jail since 2019 in a terror funding case has won a Lok Sabha seat.
Sheikh Abdul Rashid won from northern Baramulla constituency as an independent candidate, beating the region’s former chief minister, Omar Abdullah. Rashid’s campaign was run by his two sons, who hoped a win would lead to his release from prison.
“I think it’s time to accept the inevitable,” Abdullah wrote on X. “I don’t believe his victory will hasten his release from prison nor will the people of North Kashmir get the representation they have a right to but the voters have spoken and in a democracy that’s all that matters.”
India and Pakistan have fought two wars over Kashmir, which is divided between the neighbors but claimed by both in its entirety. Modi’s government revoked Indian-controlled Kashmir’s semi-autonomous status during a 2019 security clampdown.
Rebel groups in the region have been fighting against Indian rule since 1989 and tens of thousands of people have been killed in the armed uprising and subsequent Indian military crackdown. The rebels want Kashmir to be united under Pakistani rule or become an independent country. (AP)
