Sunday’s ceremony, held at the grand presidential palace on a sweltering summer night in New Delhi, marked a rare accomplishment but also a humbling new reality for the 73-year-old leader of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP). Modi became only the second Indian prime minister, after Jawaharlal Nehru, India’s founding father, to be sworn in for three successive terms. But it also marked the beginning of one of the most uncertain periods of his career.
After winning an outright majority in Parliament in 2014 and 2019, Modi consolidated power, sidelined his rivals and built up a cult of personality, with his cabinet ministers regularly pledging fealty to Modi in public and his face adorning ubiquitous billboards and government welfare campaigns.
But election results this week showed that his BJP won only 240 of the 272 seats needed for a majority in the Lok Sabha lower house. For the first time, Modi needed help from his National Development Alliance coalition partners to form a new government. And as he began power-sharing negotiations behind closed doors last week, Modi already began to strike a more humble tone in public.
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In a nationally televised speech to his coalition partners late Friday, Modi repeatedly referred to the NDA government — a departure from the previous term, when he commonly spoke of the “Modi government.” Often criticized as a leader who only appealed to Hindi-speaking Hindus in north and central India, Modi now described his coalition as representing all of India’s diversity and noted that they also garnered votes from Christians and south Indians.
“I want to thank the people of the country for giving us a majority and assure them that we will leave no stone unturned to take the country forward by consensus,” Modi said. “This is the strongest coalition government in the history of coalition governments.”
Sunday night’s ceremony was attended by leaders from neighboring South Asian countries, including Bangladesh and Sri Lanka, as well as India’s top business leaders and Bollywood superstars. While some key members from Modi’s previous cabinet, including Home Minister Amit Shah, Defense Minister Rajnath Singh and Railway Minister Nitin Gadkari, renewed their oaths to serve in the next government, it was not immediately clear how Modi would reshuffle his cabinet or whether his close allies would retain key levers of power, including control over investigative and law enforcement agencies.
Anant Gupta contributed to this report.
