There are two major national political parties in India: the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) of prime minister Narendar Modi and the Indian National Congress (INC) of opposition figurehead Rahul Gandhi. In the recently completed 2024 elections, the BJP won 36.6% of the national vote (down 0.8% from 2019) while the INC won 21.2% (up 1.7%). No other party won more than 5% of the total popular vote, and no other party won a meaningful vote share outside its home state.
In short, India has a nascent two-party system, which is complicated by the local dominance of many single-state parties. In a first-past-the-post system like India’s, this means that similar vote shares can yield wildly divergent results. For example, although the BJP’s vote share declined by less than 1 percentage point in the recent election, its seat count declined from 303 to 240 in India’s 543-seat lower house. In fact, the BJP had won 282 seats with 31.0% of the vote in 2014, compared to 240 seats with 36.6% of the vote in 2024.
Similarly, the INC went from 44 seats with 19.3% of the vote in 2014 to 52 seats with 19.5% in 2019 to 99 seats with 21.2% in 2024. An increase of less than 2 percentage points in vote share between 2014 and 2024 led to a better-than-double number of seats. Due to the complexities of first-past-the-post in a multiparty system, the BJP now has 41 more seats than it would have under proportional representation, while the INC has 16 seats fewer than it would have garnered. That may seem unfair, but the situation is more complicated than it sounds. If India actually did have proportional representation, both parties would have pursued different electoral strategies.
Most political analyses of the election results have focused on the fact that the BJP will now have to rely on coalition partners to remain in government. This is a red herring. All of the BJP’s coalition partners are single-state parties. They will be more concerned to win local concessions for their states and electorates than to influence national policy. A highway here and a cricket stadium is all it will take to buy them off. These parties will have little incentive to bring down the government, since (1) they stand little to gain from fresh elections and (2) were they instead to join the INC in a grand coalition of minor parties, they would be competing with half a dozen other state parties for central government give-aways.
Take-away: unlike some past coalition governments, this will be a relatively stable coalition.
On the other side of politics, the near-doubling of the number of seats going to the INC will give the party’s beleaguered establishment a new lease on life. The national INC has been on life support for ten years, with “the Family” (the Nehru-Gandhi family, no relation to the Mahatma) fiercely resisting reform. The INC is a dynatic party in a sense completely unfamiliar to Americans, but entirely characteristic of the postcolonial world. It is, quite simply, a family party. The United States has its Clintons and Bushes, but neither of these families outright controls the political party with which it is associated. In India, the Gandhi family literally decides who will get the INC hand (see above) to run in national elections.
That may (or may not) be good for the Family, but it is a problem for the INC, and a problem for India. In a rapidly modernizing country like India, with a fractious news media and relentlessly competitive politics, the age of the family party is over. Like the Daleys in Chicago, family dynasties may still flourish now and again at the local level, but no one seriously believes that family-run parties are the future of 21st century democratic politics. As Thomas Paine wrote in 1776, “we ought to remember that virtue is not hereditary.” Too many international commentators seem to forget this Common Sense when writing about Third World democracy.
If the INC had remained stuck at 40-50 seats this election, the Family would have come under serious pressure to loosen its grip over the party’s bureaucratic machinery after a third straight electoral defeat. But the near-doubling of seats means that a whole new cohort of INC parliamentarians owes their jobs directly to the Family. As a result, internal party reform has been delayed for at least a decade, since even if the INC does poorly in 2029, the party will still nurture hopes of a bounce-back in 2034. And although a family-run INC may still sting the modern, bureaucratic BJP (as it did this year), it is unlikely ever to beat it.
Take-away: India will lack a robust national opposition party for at least another decade.
The BJP may have “lost” the 2024 election, but it still has more than double the seats of the INC, which clearly did not “win” the election. Having grown fat with complacency fostered by PM Narendra Modi’s personal popularity, the BJP will emerge from this election a leaner, hungrier party. Its organizational machine — for it is an organizational machine — will be running in top gear from now until 2029. The INC, by contrast, will remain an old-style, clientelistic family organization. It will not be able to mount a coherent national opposition to the BJP. Its party figurehead (who is still not its party leader) Rahul Gandhi may be able to win the occasional soundbite, but he will lack the bureaucratic machinery needed to win a national election.
If anyone would like to discuss this in more detail, join my livestream on YouTube this Sunday (June 9) Australia/India time, or Saturday night US time, at:
I hope to see many of you there!
The Salvatore Babones Newsletter will return.