Opinion: Why The 2024 Lok Sabha Polls Will Be A Decisive Verdict

The 2024 general election will be a decisive one in many ways. Yet, the most important one will be how the voters’ mind and priorities have changed. 

Prime Minister Narendra Modi and his Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) effectively crushed the opposition north of the Vindhyas in 2019. Only 30 of its seats-28 from Karnataka-came from South India, and yet it easily topped the 300-mark. The Prime Minister and party have shown no signs of fatigue, dominating the political narrative in Parliament, media, public sphere, on social media networks, and at the grassroots. The unwieldy opposition alliance, INDIA, has collapsed, coming apart at the seams under the weight of the partners’ ambitions and the organisational weakness of the Congress Party which is trying to hold it together. One key ally in Bihar, Nitish Kumar, has already defected to the BJP-led National Democratic Alliance (NDA). 

The engineering aside, Modi has staked his own soaring popularity in aiming for 370 seats for the BJP and over 400 for the NDA. In 2014, the BJP won nine seats for every percentage point gain in vote share. That dropped to eight seats per percentage point in 2019. If it maintains the same rate, it will need about 45% vote share to hit Modi’s target. No party can match the well-oiled, tech-savvy, cash-rich BJP organisation and its grassroots reach backed by the disciplined cadre of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) down to the booth level. 

If Modi is able to manifest the kind of victory he is aiming for, the country will cross the rubicon to a level of one-party dominance that will be difficult to reverse. Foreign minister S. Jaishankar assured a Japanese audience last week that India will have a stable government with a parliamentary majority for at least the next 15 years, if not more.