Making Sense of the 2024 Election Outcomes: Three Possible Narratives
The election results announced on June 4 yet again demonstrated the capacity of Indian democracy to defy dominant narratives and expectations. Since most commentators, analysts, and pollsters were not able to predict the results, the glib ex post facto interpretations should also be taken with a pinch of salt. Given that elections are about all aspects of a polity, simple narratives usually fall short of the mark when it comes to explaining election outcomes. Individuals have their own reasons for giving their vote to a particular candidate or party, and we do not observe these reasons. In countries where the methods of studying public opinion are better developed, surveys are able to capture some aspects of a voter’s choice and reasoning. But this does not seem to be the case in India.
What we can do instead is offer a description of the conditions in which the elections were held as well as the efforts made by the contesting parties. Based on such a description, we could construct plausible narratives to explain the outcomes. The conditions in question include the economic, political, and social changes (or lack thereof) that might relate to the elections as well as the institutional setting through which the parties communicate and mobilize. The efforts undertaken include the strategic moves made by the parties to seek support. In offering the narratives constructed from these descriptions, we should not make truth claims because it is rather difficult to test the validity of such claims, even though it is much easier to test the validity of the descriptions.
The Bharatiya Janata Party’s (BJP) seat count fell from 303 to 240 (44 percent of the seats), which is thirty-two seats short of the majority mark, and its vote share fell from 37.4 percent to 36.6 percent. The National Democratic Alliance (NDA) won 293 seats (54 percent of the seats) while receiving 42.5 percent of the votes. The opposition, the Indian National Developmental Inclusive Alliance (hereafter, the INDIA bloc or INDIA), won 234 seats (43 percent of the seats) and 40.6 percent of the votes. This performance is well below the expectations that the NDA’s leadership had presented—they had aimed at securing more than 400 seats. It is also well below the estimates presented by most pollsters. While we do not know the reasons for this outcome, we can offer a few narratives. These are not mutually exclusive.
Narrative One: The Temporary Consolidation of Opposition Parties Denied the BJP a Majority
One way to interpret these results is that they understate support for the BJP because of an unusual consolidation among opposition parties—compared to the 2019 elections, the Indian National Congress (hereafter, the Congress Party or Congress) reduced the number of seats it contested by about a hundred. This led to the BJP receiving one of the lowest ever seat-share-to-vote-share ratios for the largest party in a general election. The INDIA bloc was formed with the agenda of countering the BJP’s increasing dominance.
This was somewhat similar to what happened in the 1977 elections, when there was a near-total consolidation of opposition parties into a single party—the Janata Party—and an alliance—the Janata Party + Left Front alliance. This consolidation helped reduce the number of seats secured by the Congress Party to 154 (28.4 percent of the seats in the Lok Sabha), even though it had received 34.5 percent of the votes. This was the lowest seat-share-to-vote-share ratio for the party. The consolidation of several parties into two major ones is usually expected in first-past-the-post systems, but this has not been the pattern in India. The Janata Party lasted less than three years. When it splintered, the Congress Party came back to power in 1980, winning 353 seats (65 percent of the seats in the Lok Sabha) and 42.7 percent of the votes.
In the present scenario, there are several sources of precarity for the INDIA bloc. First, there may be a conflict between what the Congress Party needs to do to emerge as a serious contender for government formation and what the alliance partners may find acceptable. The Congress will have to win 150 seats or more to have a shot at government formation. In the 2024 elections, it won 99 seats, and only about 30 percent of the seats it contested. Unless it improves the win ratio considerably, it will have to contest from more seats, which will lead to conflicts with other parties in the INDIA bloc. In hindsight, 2019 is being seen as the peak for the BJP. But if 2024 turns out to be the peak for the Congress Party as a part of INDIA, it would mean that the party will have to figure out some other way of growing. Second, the INDIA bloc is an unusual form of alliance. Its constituents fought each other in some of the states. For instance, in West Bengal, Kerala, and Punjab, the constituents of INDIA fought each other in all the seats. In Jammu and Kashmir, they fought each other in three out of the five seats. While such an alliance made sense under pressure from the BJP’s dominance, sooner or later, these internal contestations will threaten the alliance.
If we accept this interpretation, it means that if the BJP plays its cards right, it could come back with a majority in 2029. It could even consider calling elections earlier to return to power with a majority if the INDIA bloc does not last as an alliance. In any case, the key will be to do to INDIA what Indira Gandhi is alleged to have done to the Janata Party—sow seeds of feud. However, it will not be easy to do so, mainly because the INDIA bloc did not come to power. Had it done so, the contestation around key positions, other levers of power, and the exercise of power would have revealed the fissures. In politics, a ruling coalition must resolve such differences, while the privilege of the opposition coalition is that it can afford to continue with its ambiguities.
On its part, the leadership of the INDIA bloc will have to maintain and build on the political creativity displayed in the last few months to manage the contradictions, but it will also have to develop a strategy to achieve a comfortable majority by 2029 and in the state elections before that. What may work in its favor is that, with the BJP having lost its majority, its ability to stifle the opposition parties’ chances may have diminished. It has been pointed out that the opposition parties fought the 2024 elections in challenging circumstances. For example, they faced significant financial disadvantages along with pro-BJP reportage by many mainstream media outlets. Most of these disadvantages were partly dependent on the BJP’s electoral dominance. To the extent that this dominance has now been dented, the opposition parties have an opportunity to oppose the government more freely. For starters, since the Congress Party won more than 10 percent of the seats, the Lok Sabha officially has a leader of the opposition for the first time in ten years.
Narrative Two: The BJP Lost Majority Because of the Performance on Economic Issues
Economic issues span those that the government directly undertakes, such as taxation and expenditure, and those it influences through policies, such as inflation, income growth, and employment. One plausible reason for the BJP’s below-expectation performance is that its work in these areas did not improve as much between 2019 and 2024 as it had between 2014 and 2019. This comparison is obviously complicated by the fact that the 2019–24 period saw the greatest pandemic in a century. We do not know to what extent voters made allowances for the exogenous aspects of this shock and to what extent they blamed the government for what they perceived as wrong policy choices, but we can describe the facts.
Between 2018–19 and 2023–24, the gross domestic product (GDP) at constant prices grew at a compounded annual growth rate of 4.4 percent, while in the previous five years (2019–24), it had grown by 7.4 percent. This, of course, comes with the caveat about the controversies around GDP estimates during this period, as many economists have questioned the validity of these estimates. The average consumption growth during the previous five-year period (2014–19) was 7.2 percent, while that during the last five years was 4.3 percent. Also, as we argued in a previous issue of this newsletter, the available data suggests that the government’s push to improve manufacturing in India has not delivered much success so far. In addition, the average retail inflation in the last five years was about 5.7 percent, while between 2013–14 and 2018–19, it had been 4.5 percent.
In another issue of this newsletter, we had also discussed the changing patterns of welfare spending by the union government between 2014 and 2019. This entailed the prioritization of delivering cash or private goods, such as housing, toilets, bank accounts, cooking gas, and electricity; direct transfers of cash, goods, and services; and leveraging resources by mobilizing funds from state governments, public sector enterprises, and private sector corporations for its schemes. Just before the 2019 elections, the government also increased its contribution toward government officials’ pensions under the National Pension System from 10 percent to 14 percent. These were electorally consequential changes that helped the government receive more credit than previous union governments had for delivering some of these benefits.
What is the incremental rise in benefits received from the government since the 2019 elections? As discussed in a previous issue of this newsletter, since 2019, the improvements have not been as dramatic as they were between 2014 and 2019. When the Pradhan Mantri Kisan Samman Nidhi scheme started in December 2018, the cash transfer under the scheme was INR 6,000 per year. The amount is the same even now, which means that in real terms, the transfer has fallen by about 30 percent. Similarly, as the World Bank’s Global Findex Database shows, while the percentage of the population with savings accounts rose from 53 percent in 2014 to 80 percent in 2017, it fell to 78 percent in 2021.
Further, between October 2017 and March 2019, most of the unelectrified households as identified by the government were electrified under the Saubhagya scheme. On the delivery of cooking gas connections as well, a similar pattern can be seen under the Pradhan Mantri Ujjwala Yojana, with many more connections given before 2019 than after. The majority of the shift to direct benefit transfers was also achieved prior to 2019. Although, in 2020–21 and 2021–22, on account of the pandemic responses, there was a temporary scale-up in transfers.
The government has also taken new initiatives and expanded existing schemes. Since the launch of the Jal Jeevan Mission in August 2019, about 104.6 million households have been given piped water connections under the scheme. This represents a huge leap in the number of connections. However, for this to translate into goodwill among the voters, what matters is that there is a reasonable amount of water supply coming through the pipes. As some reports suggest, this has been more difficult to ensure than just creating the connections. Further, the Pradhan Mantri Garib Kalyan Package, under which 5 kilograms of free food grains are given to poor households, was launched during the nationwide lockdown in the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic in April 2020. The scheme has been extended until 2028.
Overall, if we assume that the improvements made before April 2019 were factored into the votes in the 2019 elections, it may be that the relatively small incremental improvement since then meant that the government did not benefit as much from this strategy as it had in the 2019 elections. However, the economic issues are not straightforward. Plausible alibis can be offered, especially for this time period. The problems of inflation and relatively more modest economic growth were partly on account of the pandemic, and many other countries, including those in our neighborhood, have done worse. Similarly, the relatively small improvements in welfare transfers are because more fiscal space is being used for infrastructure development. However, the situation did present an opportunity for the opposition and a challenge for the ruling party.
If we accept this interpretation, the political possibilities from now on will depend on how well the economy does, especially in terms of increasing median incomes and creating jobs, and on the fiscal strategy that the government chooses. The fiscal choices also depend on how well the economy grows. Since the government is on a glide path to fiscal consolidation, it will have to make choices about how quickly it would want to revert to the normative fiscal deficit of 3 percent of GDP and zero primary deficit. More importantly, it will have to choose how it will allocate the expenditure.
Narrative Three: The BJP Lost Majority Because It Did Not Offer a Clear Vision of the Future on Cultural, Security, and Political Issues
Since 2019, the BJP has prioritized expending capital on certain difficult political and cultural issues. The most prominent of these were the change in the constitutional status of Jammu and Kashmir, the construction of the Ram temple in Ayodhya (after a Supreme Court judgment paved the way for it), and the Citizenship (Amendment) Act, 2019 (CAA). Since these decisions had already been implemented, it is not clear what remaining major issues the party was asking the mandate for. Its expectation of securing more than 400 seats implied that the party was planning to do something grand, but the campaign never explained what it was.
Some of the decisions taken since 2019 were indeed popular, but because they had already been implemented, it is not clear whether they benefited the party in these elections. For instance, in the post-poll National Election Studies survey conducted by the Centre for the Study of Developing Societies, 22.4 percent of respondents said that the construction of the Ram temple was the one work by the union government they liked the most. No other work of the government comes even close to this. However, among the respondents who said that the BJP-led NDA government should get another chance (46.4 percent), only 5.2 percent, or about 2.4 percent of all respondents, said that the government should get another chance for “protecting religious interests/construction of Ram temple.” The CAA did not figure prominently among those works of the government that the respondents liked; only 0.9 percent ranked it as the work they liked the most. Similarly, the change in the constitutional status of Jammu and Kashmir did not figure as one of the most liked works. Only 1.5 percent of respondents deemed it the most liked work, and only 1.3 percent of those who agreed that the government should get another chance said that the removal of Article 370 was the main reason for their support.
This narrative suggests that some of these major decisions did not even matter much in the 2024 elections, and the ones that were popular and prominent in public memory are not seen as major reasons for voting for the BJP again. Further, as mentioned before, since there were no such major promises offered in the recent campaigns, the reasons for which the BJP was asking for a supermajority were not clear. It seemed like the party wanted the mandate to get more freedom of action to do what it wants, and the voters were expected to simply have faith in it. Perhaps this may have also spooked the opposition parties into coming together and cost the BJP in terms of the enthusiasm of its supporters and party activists. Writing soon after the election results, one former general secretary of the party seemed to counsel the party’s leadership to exercise “humility and civility.”
If we accept this narrative, the future course of Indian politics will partly depend on which party will be able to capture the voters’ imagination by offering an agenda for improving their lives in a manner that they care about across all aspects—political, security, cultural, and economic. In India, there are a variety of issues on which different agendas for political action can be constructed and offered to the voters. This moment at least marks a pause for the BJP’s juggernaut, creating space not just for the opposition to rebuild its political appeal but also for the BJP to refashion itself to retake a majority.
Conclusion
Given the complexity of Indian politics, it is quite difficult to explain election outcomes comprehensively and precisely. This essay offers only three of the many plausible narratives to explain the outcomes of the 2024 elections. It is possible to construct other narratives by combining them and giving different weights to each one. What matters is that we consider all the important aspects of Indian politics, along with what they mean for the political strategies of different parties in the next few years.
A Review of Governing Urban India: Policy and Practice by A. Ravindra
Urban governance has become increasingly salient to India’s policy discourse in recent years. Indian cities have become more populous and are grappling with issues related to affordability, sanitation, and infrastructure provisioning. Recent literature on urban India has placed increasing emphasis on governance institutions. Governing Urban India: Policy and Practice (2024) by A. Ravindra is the latest addition to this literature, providing valuable insights into the challenges of urban governance from a practitioner’s perspective.
After having served in the Housing and Urban Development Department, Bangalore City Municipal Corporation, and the Bangalore Development Authority (BDA), among others, A. Ravindra retired as chief secretary to the Government of Karnataka. His book examines the challenges of urban governance through the prism of the city of Bengaluru.
Ravindra locates the challenge of urban governance in the broader framework of the growth of cities in India and takes a long, historical view of the institutions that govern them. The book’s initial chapters provide a brief history of Indian cities and note that they arose not just as centers of trade, but also as centers of administration and temple towns. He further notes that the growth and decline of these cities were largely contingent on political patronage. It should be noted though, that many temple towns in India have survived multiple changes in political regimes in India’s past.
The initial chapters also detail the legacy of colonial rule and its impact on urban governance in India. The Dutch, the Portuguese, and pre-eminently the British, left an indelible legacy on India’s urban landscape. The British, more so than others, not only settled numerous new cities but also developed the first modern legal and institutional instruments for city governance. Most interesting in this section of the book is Ravindra’s account of the repeated attempts by some British officials to introduce local self-government in India, and the headwinds these attempts faced. His account of the reception of Lord Ripon’s 1882 resolution to create elected urban local bodies and the failure of the 1907 Royal Commission on Decentralisation in India shows how different arms of the British government engaged in repeated tussles over the question of devolving power to local self-governments, and how the resistance usually won out. The Simon Commission’s observation that Indian decentralization looked like European “deconcentration,” where the chief executive of the local government is appointed rather than elected, is noteworthy. Ravindra uses these examples to show the historical path dependency of the design of urban governance institutions.
The other major contribution of the British rule mentioned in the book is the introduction of English precepts of planning and architecture, particularly in major cities like Mumbai, Kolkata, and Chennai. This included an emphasis on creating more sanitary conditions for residents, but through an approach that was elitist and segregationist. Decongestion often involved clearing out the poor from the city center. Separate parts of the city were planned for the ruling administrative class and the military, away from the old cities. As the author correctly notes, the lack of planning for the poor continued in the approach to planning well after independence.
During this period, Indian princely states were also establishing new cities. Ravindra provides a succinct account of the historical development of cities like Mysore, Bangalore, and others, especially in southern India. Many of these, he notes, were also temple towns with a multi-religious character. Mysore and Bangalore benefitted from the early introduction of roads, railways, and electricity. The Dewans of Mysore were visionary administrators who established new factories and educational institutions and made Bangalore a garden city.
Indian policymakers largely ignored urbanization as a phenomenon in the first decades following independence. Ravindra notes how the first few Five Year Plans of the Planning Commission largely overlooked the developmental aspect of cities, choosing instead to focus on issues related to slums and decongestion. The fifth and the sixth Five Year Plans were the first to focus on the problem of urban housing. It was only in the ninth Five Year Plan that the development of urban areas as economic entities explicitly entered the Planning Commission’s lexicon.
In the early years after independence, Indian policymakers prioritized rural India and agriculture. Concern towards cities was limited, resulting in the creation of new industrial cities to complement the government’s focus on large capital-intensive industries. Additionally, there was a focus on the planned development of cities like Delhi and Chandigarh, which led to the creation of city-level “development authorities” like the Delhi Development Authority. These institutional designs were subsequently replicated in many other cities. It was only in the 1980s that a National Commission on Urbanisation proposed that cities be considered economic entities and critiqued the prevailing approaches to urban governance. In particular, there was criticism of the Master Plan process, which was also reflected in the twelfth Five Year Plan (2012–2017).
Indian urbanization during this period was therefore largely unplanned, informal, unequal, and slow by global standards. For the most part, the Master Plan process did not work well, and cities grew despite this, rather than because of it. Peppered throughout the book are vignettes of Ravindra’s experiences as an administrator in this milieu in the state of Karnataka. Accounts of his successes and failures highlight the messy, negotiated, and frustrating process of improving services and infrastructure in urban India. His account of creating a City Development Plan is instructive about the failures of the governance process, including the lack of clarity on accountability for the plan’s design and implementation, as well as the limitations of the plan itself. The “…CDP turned out to be primarily a land-use plan…an important part of the land use plan pertains to zoning regulations which attract considerable attention, particularly of builders and architects…,” he writes (p. 75–76). Ravindra further questions the credibility of the data that informed infrastructural requirement estimates and calls out the callous approach of the BDA town planners in determining land use. At a structural level, he points out the lack of consultative mechanisms in the planning process and highlights deficiencies in the oversight of the plan’s implementation.
A distinguishing feature of the book is that it places the mechanisms and institutions of urban governance in the context of India’s economic development and the changing nature of Indian cities. It highlights the rigidity and non-responsiveness of governance institutions when faced with an increasingly dynamic economy and evolving cities. Ravindra places urban governance institutions within the larger political economy and lays out their shortcomings, particularly in light of the emergence of a new set of elites in many Indian cities who have managed to capture urban resources, mainly land. This has led to distortions in land markets and scarcity which, in turn, has had an impact on economic growth. He notes, correctly, that there is no formulaic solution to combating this problem, but adds, “In India, this failure may be attributed, at least partly, to the supine indifference of the government to formulate the right kind of policy or to regulate the wrong kind of market behavior.”
While Ravindra presents a unified picture of emerging Indian cities, the true value of the book lies in its ability to relate the author’s experiences to the deficiencies in the administrative and institutional apparatus of urban governance. In his account, the history of how these institutions were created and the philosophy that influenced their design continues to have an impact today. These were arguably not ideal even when they were first introduced and are definitely inadequate today. As he correctly points out, establishing effective urban governance institutions is, at the least, as important as the specific policy measures. Since it is the former that decides what form the latter will take, getting institutions right is probably the most daunting challenge in urban governance.
This is in contrast to many other works of a similar kind that focus almost exclusively on policy measures. Governing Urban India also offers critical analyses of policy measures like land acquisition laws, rent control, slum rehabilitation, and so on. In addition to these, Ravindra also emphasizes the importance of ensuring that decision-making processes are informed, consultative, evidence-based, and participatory. As such, Governing Urban India is an insightful addition to the growing literature on the governance of Indian cities.