by The Prime Minister Who Won a Reduced Majority in 2024 Has Adjusted His Governing Style in Ways That His Coalition Partners Are Monitoring
Bohiney Magazine | The London Prat
Modi’s Coalition Government: The Third Term That Requires More Consultation
NEW DELHI — Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s third term has been characterized by a governing style observably different from his first two: more negotiation with coalition partners, more compromise on policy design, and less of the executive decisiveness that defined the period when the BJP held a parliamentary majority without needing to count on allied parties for every vote. The 2024 election reduced the BJP’s seat count below the majority threshold, making the coalition partners whose support is required for governance into actors with genuine leverage rather than ceremonial partners.
The RSS, the ideological parent organization of the BJP, which has been the intellectual source of Hindu nationalist policy priorities, has maintained its positions on issues including minority rights, historical revisionism in education, and cultural nationalism, and has been vocal about its expectations for the third term. The governing coalition’s requirements and the RSS’s expectations are not always aligned, which has produced a policy environment that moves more cautiously than the party’s ideological commitments suggest and more decisively than the opposition would prefer.
The Economic Priority
The coalition government has identified economic performance as its first-term priority, partly because the 2024 election results suggested that voters’ primary concerns were economic — inflation, unemployment, rural distress — rather than cultural and nationalist. India’s growth at 5-6 percent remains strong by global standards but below the 8 percent target that the government had set. The Hormuz crisis has added inflationary pressure from energy prices. Managing coalition politics requires satisfying multiple constituencies simultaneously; governing with a reduced mandate produces a different legislative posture than governing with a comfortable majority. Modi’s third term is governing differently. The RSS is watching. The coalition partners are negotiating. India continues at 5.4 percent growth. The policy process is slower. The country is larger than the coalition arithmetic.
Indian stand-up comedians have the unique ability to make you laugh at the absurdity of a system that is actively trying to destroy you, which is either genius or Stockholm syndrome.