Coalition Governments 2.0: NDA

Abstract

The 2024 Lok Sabha election produced the most significant setback to the Bharatiya Janata Party's electoral position since 2014, reducing it from an outright majority of 303 seats to 240, and returning Narendra Modi to office for a third consecutive term only as the head of a coalition genuinely dependent on its allies for a parliamentary majority. This represented a structural departure from the preceding decade, during which the National Democratic Alliance, though nominally a coalition, had functioned in practice as a single-party-dominant arrangement, with the Bharatiya Janata Party requiring no partner's support to govern. This paper examines how the National Democratic Alliance has managed coalition politics in this changed arithmetic, focusing on the bargaining position and demands of its two pivotal regional partners, the Janata Dal (United) and the Telugu Desam Party, the government's use of state assembly election victories in Delhi and Bihar to reassert political momentum, and the organisational adjustments undertaken within the Bharatiya Janata Party itself. It situates this experience within the longer history of coalition management in India traced in earlier scholarship, and evaluates the extent to which the strategies that sustained full-term coalitions after 1999 remain applicable to a coalition of this altered character.

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