On 4 june 2024, India emerged from the Modi miasma into which its corporate leaders had cast it. Bankrolling by ‘India, Inc.’ had created a mystique of invincibility around the Prime Minister. This was further inflated by India’s godi [lapdog] media, which parroted claims that Modi was the most popular leader in the world.footnote¹ Beloved of billionaires and Bollywood stars, yet pure and pious, never forgetting his modest origins, bringing happiness to the humblest homes, he had unleashed the animal spirits of the Indian economy, now set to overtake China’s as a world powerhouse, a high-tech and service-centre hub, while showering cooking-gas cylinders and flushable toilets upon the grateful poor. It could not last. The economic policy demanded—and received—by India, Inc. required imposing economic pain of a scale and severity that could not be electorally costless. The money- and media-driven inflation of the Modi cult could not defer payment forever and in 2024, votes finally dispelled the vapours money generated.

The 2024 election campaign was launched in January with the spectacular consecration of the newly built Mandir [Temple] of the god Ram in Ayodhya, in the Hindi heartland state of Uttar Pradesh, constructed on the site of the thirteenth-century Babri Mosque which Hindutva mobs had demolished in 1992. In the bjp’s most overblown aestheticization of politics to date, Modi starred as both prime minister and priest, playing solo lead in a lavishly choreographed ceremony, watched by a glittering array of movie stars and much of the country’s ruling class, not to mention hundreds of thousands of devotees and a national tv audience in the hundreds of millions.

The Electoral Commission had helpfully scheduled the second longest election ever, seven phases extending over 44 days, so that Modi could campaign in each bloc of constituencies in turn. The election was cast as a plebiscite on Modi’s persona alone: his was the sole face of the bjp, at rallies, on posters, in ads and the media, as if he alone was running for his party in all the hundreds of seats. Modi’s triumphalist slogan was ‘This time, over 400!’—‘Ab ki baar, 400 paar!’ The bjp’s electoral bloc, the National Democratic Alliance (nda), was supposed to surpass 400 seats and the bjp itself to win 370, a two-thirds supermajority. Winning a third term would equal the record of the country’s first Prime Minister, Nehru, and the supermajority would surpass it. Opinion polls suggested the bjp would easily top even its hubristic goals. Only those who stood beyond the swirling vapours argued that the electorate could deliver a substantially different verdict. Psephologist Yogendra Yadav had proposed on the last day of polling that in these circumstances, ‘anything below 300 would be a moral defeat; a tally below 272’—the halfway mark—‘would be a political defeat for the bjp and below 250 would be a personal defeat for Modi.’footnote²

With a final score of 240 seats, Modi suffered all three. The bjp’s tally was 63 fewer than the 303 seats it had won in 2019. The trend of its increasing vote share went into reverse: having risen from 18 per cent in 2009 to 31 per cent in 2014 and 38 per cent in 2019, the bjp dropped to below 37 per cent in 2024, even though it contested more seats each time. Even Modi’s nda allies put him to shame by increasing their tally slightly. The nda bloc as a whole took 293 seats in the 543-seat Lok Sabha, compared to 234 seats for the Congress Party’s bloc, india. Congress itself carried 99 seats, nearly doubling its 2019 tally. These dramatic changes in seat tallies rested, however, on small shifts in the parties’ vote shares —an outcome of India’s Westminster-style first-past-the-post system. The bjp dropped just 1.2 percentage points from 2019, while Congress rose by 1.49 points, from 19.7 to 21.19 per cent.

In the Hindi heartland, however, there were, as Yadav and his colleagues pointed out, small but critical shifts towards Congress/india among landed peasants—Jats in Haryana, Yadavs in Uttar Pradesh and Bihar—while the rural poor in those regions, the so-called ‘extremely backward classes’ (ebcs) of landless agrarian and manual labour, swung against the bjp by 10 percentage points, a measure of the crisis in the Indian countryside. Congress also improved its proportion of the Dalit vote, rising from 25 per cent in 2019 to 32 per cent, while the bjp’s share fell from 41 to 36 per cent, its Dalit support only holding up in Gujarat and Madhya Pradesh.footnote³

The bjp retained most of its core vote bloc: upper castes—a vote bank that more than matches Congress’s Muslim bloc—as well as middle-class Hindus, a solid majority of urban voters and a large section of the ebcs. The bjp actually increased its vote among Adivasis and tribal peoples, where Congress trailed by 20 per cent, and among ebcs in the southern states of Karnataka, Telangana and Kerala.footnote⁴ Beyond this, however, the bjp failed to make significant inroads in the south, despite great effort and expense. Tamil Nadu kept Hindutva out altogether, although the bjp contested many more seats there. Kerala conceded one seat, perhaps because the bjp ran a film star who steered clear of Hindutva in a multi-religious state where Hindus are a bare majority. The bjp incurred significant losses in its traditional strongholds in the Hindi heartlands and even lost a seat in Gujarat, which it has never done under Modi. Worse, it lost its giant Uttar Pradesh bastion, falling from 71 seats (out of 80) in 2014 to 33 seats in 2024.

That blow was particularly hard. The Modi regime had invested on a pharaonic scale, both financially and politically, in the Ram Mandir. Its consecration was supposed to be 2024’s electoral big bazooka, delivering ‘400 paar!’ principally by keeping Uttar Pradesh securely in the bjp’s pocket. However, the opposing politics of ‘Mandal’footnote⁵—which ‘Mandir’ appeared to have vanquished in recent decades—returned with a vengeance, sponsored by an opposition more keenly aware of the importance of caste oppression and more effectively united than it had been since 2014. Ill-equipped to meet this challenge, the bjp lost the Faizabad seat, of which Ayodhya is a part, to a Dalit candidate. Modi himself was re-elected from the holy city of Varanasi (Banares) with a humiliatingly modest margin of 1.52 lakh (152,000) votes, compared to his 2019 margin of 4.79 lakhs (479,000). Rahul Gandhi, current scion of the Congress dynasty, managed 3.9 and 3.64 lakh margins (390,000 and 364,000) in Rae Bareli and Wayanad, the two seats he contested.footnote⁶