It might have seemed like the Bharatiya Janata Party, the party of Indian prime minister Narendra Modi, had broken Indian democracy. But the results of India’s general election, announced on Tuesday and Wednesday, show that the BJP isn’t invincible and the Indian opposition remains a viable force to keep elections competitive.
For the first few decades after independence, India didn’t really have competitive elections between political parties. The Indian National Congress, the party that led the independence movement, had a lock on the majority in the Lok Sabha, the lower house of India’s parliament, from the first election in 1951 through the election in 1984, failing to win an outright majority of seats only in the 1977 election.
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