Modi’s BJP to lose majority in India election shock, needs allies for gov’t

Defying exit polls, opposition parties stun the BJP in vital states, resetting India’s political landscape.

New Delhi, India — Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) is on course to lose its national majority after suffering major losses in key states, marking a dramatic shift in a political landscape it has dominated for the past decade.

The BJP is on track to comfortably emerge as the country’s single-largest party in the Lok Sabha, the lower house of India’s parliament. But as election officials declared leads and results from India’s six-week-long election on Tuesday, it became apparent that the BJP would struggle to repeat its performances from 2014 and 2019.

Unlike both those elections, when the BJP won clear majorities on its own in a house of 543 seats, its leads and wins were hovering around 240 constituencies through much of the day. The halfway mark is 272 seats.

By contrast, the opposition INDIA alliance, led by the Congress party, was projected to win more than 200 seats, suggesting a far closer contest than exit polls had predicted. Released on June 1 after the final phase of India’s election cycle, the exit polls had suggested that the BJP would outdo its 2019 tally of 303 seats.

Modi and his party are still likely to be able to form India’s next government — but will be dependent on a clutch of allies whose support they will need to cross the 272-seat mark. The BJP with its allies — their coalition is known as the National Democratic Alliance (NDA) — was projected to win around 290 seats in the late afternoon on Tuesday.