India’s PM Modi Sworn In For Historic Third Term

By Sanjay Kumar

Narendra Modi was sworn in for a historic third term as India’s prime minister on Sunday.

Modi is the first Indian leader to win a third straight term since founding prime minister Jawaharlal Nehru. Over the past decade, his Hindu-nationalist BJP has governed India as part of the National Democratic Alliance.

Though the coalition won the election last week, the BJP lost its absolute majority for the first time since 2014, making it dependent on allies to form a government.

After several days of uncertainty over whether the coalition partners would back the BJP, the alliance leaders unanimously backed Modi on Friday as the leader of the NDA and their prime ministerial candidate.

His swearing-in ceremony was held at the presidential palace in New Delhi on Sunday evening, in the presence of the presidents of Sri Lanka and the Maldives, the vice president of Seychelles, and the prime ministers of Bangladesh, Mauritius, Nepal and Bhutan.

In a meeting with prospective members of his new cabinet before the ceremony, the Viksit Bharat, or Developed India plan, appeared to remain a priority for Modi, according to reports from local media, as he highlighted his goal of making India a developed nation by 2047 that he often invoked during his reelection campaign.

“We need to continue with the Viksit Bharat agenda. Development work will go on without any halt,” Modi said.

While the BJP won 240 seats in India’s marathon, six-week election that began on April 19, it fell 32 short of the simple majority required in the 543-member lower house of parliament.

The NDA coalition took 293 seats after the BJP secured the backing of key allies the Telugu Desam Party in southern Andhra Pradesh state and the Janata Dal (United) in eastern Bihar state, which won 16 and 12 seats each in their respective states, pushing the alliance comfortably over the halfway mark.

But Modi’s rare third straight term is the first time in his political career that the 73-year-old must accommodate the pulls and pressures of a coalition government and work with fickle allies.

The Telugu Desam Party is led by Chandrababu Naidu, who helped build the coalition that tried to unseat Modi in the 2019 election, while the Janata Dal (United) was with the opposition as recently as January.

Prof. Gopa Kumar, of Kerala-based think tank the Centre for Public Policy Research, said that Modi’s third time as premier is “an extraordinary development,” though he expects some changes in the leadership.

“I feel that the government will be more careful this time than the past … strong opposition is good for democracy. Modi will face sharp questions in the parliament and Modi will be cautious in taking up a controversial and divisive agenda,” Kumar told Arab News.

Though many are doubting the stability of the new coalition government, Kumar said he was “optimistic” that Modi’s new administration would be able to serve its full term.

“The mandate given to the NDA government is a restricted mandate which is healthy, because most of the parliamentary democracies show that they work better in a coalition system than a single-party absolute majority.”

With the BJP’s reliance on allies, Modi is also expected to be more accommodating in his politics.

“The mandate showed that Modi as prime minister will have to be more accommodative and open to pursuing a consensual politics, which has completely disappeared from India in the last 10 years. So, it is a very mature decision of the Indian electorate,” Nilanjan Mukhopadhyay, a Delhi-based political analyst and writer, told Arab News.

“If he wants his government to survive he has to be much more humble and less authoritarian, less centralizing, more decentralizing and respecting the federal power of the state — not centralizing everything and overruling the state,” he added.

“To run his third government Modi has to be an individual, which he was not so far. He will have to work against his instinct.”