If the 2014 election marked the return of a single-party majority and heralded the rise of Narendra Modi, the 2019 polls only cemented his footprint, with the country decisively backing the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP).
These two elections were fought in the name of a single leader, and their results reflected the electorate’s approval for the man at the head of India’s political executive. But they went beyond too, reflecting changing voter aspirations, political narratives, social landscapes, modes of political communication, and a transforming India.
A behemoth is born
The staggering rise in the BJP’s vote share in the span of a decade, from 18.80% to 31% to 37.36%, corresponded with the voices on the ground.
If, in 2014, voters decided that the Centre needed a “strong” leader and government after the perceived corruption and weakness of the United Progressive Alliance (UPA)-2 years, in 2019, there was yet another question they confronted, “Modi versus who?”, and answered it decisively.
These data points and anecdotes perhaps best capture the story of India’s elections over the past decade.
Modi, Shah, Rahul Gandhi: 5 key leaders
Narendra Modi and Amit Shah represented a generational shift in the Bharatiya Janata Party; Rahul Gandhi was the Congress leader who failed to inspire his party in two consecutive Lok Sabha polls; Mamata Banerjee broke the stranglehold of the Left on West Bengal; and Nitish Kumar stepped out of the NDA after Modi was declared its prime ministerial candidate, only to return to the fold a year later, before stepping out of the alliance once again in 2022.
Scandal, airstrikes, farm plans: 5 key moments
The scandals under the UPA regime that brought about its downfall; Narendra Modi being picked as the NDA prime ministerial candidate for the 2014 polls; the February 14, 2019, terror attack in Jammu and Kashmir’s Pulwama district that led to the death of 40 security personnel, and the subsequent airstrikes in Pakistan’s Balakot; the BJP’s impressive victories in Uttar Pradesh during the 2014 and 2019 general elections; and the Centre’s PM-KISAN scheme, that offered income support for low-income farmers, assuaging farm anger and blunting one of the Opposition’s most potent platforms ahead of the 2019 polls.
The first single-party majority in a generation
The 2014 general election delivered the first single-party majority in a generation to the BJP, which won 282 of the 543 Lok Sabha seats that went to the polls. In 2019, the BJP managed to increase its tally, getting the highest vote share by a party since the 1989 election, and winning 303 seats, with the UPA a very distant second. A key takeaway was the BJP’s inroads in provinces where it was traditionally weak, such as West Bengal (18 of 42 seats) and Odisha (8 of 21 seats), as was its impressive win over the Samajwadi Party-Bahujan Samaj Party combine in Uttar Pradesh (62 of 80 seats).
A Black Swan election that (eventually) wasn’t
When the BJP won 282 Lok Sabha seats in the 2014 election, the results shocked a lot of political analysts. The 2019 results — the BJP increased its 2014 tally to 303 — proved that 2014 was more a sign of the future than an aberration in India’s political evolution.
