Saturday, November 9, 2024

Modi equals record feat of 3rd term as challenges await

Must read

Prime Minister Narendra Modi scripted history on Sunday as he took the oath of office for a third straight term, becoming the first non-Congress leader and second after Jawaharlal Nehru to achieve the feat that few thought possible for a BJP leader until he shook up national politics in 2014.
His third term, which always appeared inevitable, did not come with the massive mandate he and his party had been claiming with their typical bravado, as the Congress and its allies in the INDIA bloc fought a doughty rearguard battle to shock the BJP in its strongholds like Uttar Pradesh and Rajasthan.
It is, however, a tribute to his towering political presence that the BJP’s third-best tally of 240 seats is being seen as a disappointment by the party’s ardent supporters and projected as a “moral defeat” by the Congress whose own tally of 99 seats, its third worst, is being hailed by the opposition party.
The BJP-led National Democratic Alliance has won 293 seats, which Modi has noted is the biggest success for any pre-poll alliance when a single party did not get a majority.
Despite the challenges thrown by the polls, Modi, 73, remains the fulcrum around which Indian politics is bound to revolve in the coming years, while he himself will have to negotiate the sharp bends and blind turns of coalition politics for the first time since he entered the electoral politics as Gujarat chief minister in 2001.
Since leading the BJP for the first time in the Gujarat assembly polls in 2002, held in the shadow of the riots in the state following the Godhra train burning incident, Modi has never looked back, remaking the substance and sentiments of politics like few before him.

- Advertisement -spot_img

More articles

- Advertisement -spot_img

Latest article