Grand Tamasha: Understanding the 2024 General Election Results

It’s been more than three months since India’s massive 2024 general elections concluded, and it’s no exaggeration to say that the election results surprised many, if not most, election observers. To many, the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) seemed invincible in the national elections, especially given Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s widespread popularity. Yet, the party suffered a significant defeat, emerging as the single largest party but falling far short of a parliamentary majority.

The BJP suffered a major setback, emerging as the single largest party but failing to secure a parliamentary majority. (PTI)

So what really happened in the election? Renowned political scientist and psephologist Sanjay Kumar told his side of the story in the latest episode of “Grand Tamasha,” a weekly podcast on Indian politics and policy co-produced by HT and the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.

Kumar is a professor at the Centre for the Study of Developing Societies in New Delhi and co-director of Lokniti, India’s leading public opinion research organisation. Since 1996, Lokniti has conducted the National Election Study (NES) after every general election, creating a unique repository of knowledge on the political and social attitudes of Indian citizens.

Kumar used the findings of NES 2024 to shed light on the surprising results. At the macro level, Kumar said the BJP failed to nationalise the elections, which eventually turned into a series of state-level contests. “I think the BJP tried to make these elections a national issue, so they tried to bring the Hindutva issue to the forefront, and also the issue of Ram Mandir and Article 370. The BJP addressed the people by saying, these are the great achievements of the BJP government, (things) which we promised in our manifesto,” Kumar said.

“But what happened was that the nationalist fever has gone down a lot. The BJP failed to realise in the first few phases of the elections that people were more concerned about their day-to-day concerns like price rise, unemployment and finding jobs.”Kumar explained that the INDIA alliance, on the other hand, has been effectively promoting these core issues and they have resonated with voters to a much greater extent in 2024 compared to the 2019 elections and various state assembly elections held in the last five years.

A large part of the BJP’s problem, Kumar explained, had to do with the overconfidence of the BJP and Prime Minister Narendra Modi. “PM Modi gave a speech in which he said, ‘is baar, chaar sau paar’ (400 seats this time) (for the National Democratic Alliance). He also mentioned that when I take over as prime minister for the third time, I will take very difficult decisions at the very beginning — in the first six months of my term,” Kumar noted. This, in turn, played into the hands of the Opposition.

“When the INDIA alliance started campaigning on the ground, they started putting together these few disconnected things and they did it successfully,” Kumar said. “They went to the voters and said, look, to form a government, a party needs only 272 seats, so why is the prime minister trying to get 400? He is trying to get 400 seats in the parliament because then the basic tenets of the Constitution can be changed.”

This fuelled the belief that a BJP government armed with 400 seats would eliminate or violate reservation laws and that the recipients would be Other Backward Classes (OBCs), Dalits and Tribals. Kumar argued that this was an electoral narrative that the BJP never shook off.

Lokniti’s NES data indicates that the campaign had a strong influence on voters’ decisions, and the INDIA coalition gained many supporters who made up their minds during the campaign.