With all of India’s 640 million votes counted following a six-week-long election, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), together with its National Democratic Alliance (NDA), has won a majority, despite a sharp reduction in their seat tally compared with the 2019 elections.

Incumbent Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s governing BJP won 240 seats, falling short of the 272-mark that indicates a majority in the Lok Sabha, the lower house of India’s parliament, which has 543 seats in total. With its allies, the BJP has still secured 293 seats to win.

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The opposition INDIA alliance, led by Rahul Gandhi’s Indian National Congress (INC) party, won 232 seats, with the Congress winning 99 of those, increasing sharply from 2019, when the Congress won only 52 seats, and with its allies, in 91 constituencies.

This year’s election numbers contrast dramatically with the 2019 results when the BJP-led NDA won 353 seats, 303 of which were secured by the BJP alone.

Mapping election results

The map below represents the 543 seats in India’s lower house of parliament. The winning party/alliance are shaded for each constituency.

Why does the map look like that?

Each hexagon represents one seat, so densely populated but geographically small constituencies are shown equally with large districts to better reflect the democratic power in parliament. The geographical map is shown below for reference.

(Al Jazeera)

Key states

Uttar Pradesh (UP), a state governed by the BJP since 2017, has a total of 80 parliamentary constituencies and is India’s most populous state with more than 240 million people. As such, it holds the key to determining who governs in New Delhi. Moreover, both Modi and Gandhi contested elections from different constituencies in the state.

In 2019, the NDA won 64 seats from the state, of which the BJP alone grabbed 62. The Congress won only one seat, the Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP) won 10 and the Samajwadi Party (SP) got five.

But the 2024 outcome looks very different. The SP won 37 seats and the Congress six – totalling 43 for the INDIA alliance.

The BJP won 33 seats, while its allies secured three seats in UP. Most stunningly, the BJP lost in the Faizabad constituency, which is home to the Ram temple in Ayodhya, which Modi consecrated in January. The temple – built on the ruins of the Babri mosque, which was demolished by a Hindu mob in 1992 – was a centrepiece of the BJP’s campaign.

The BJP and its allies suffered big losses in the western state of Maharashtra as the Congress and its partners made key gains.

The INDIA alliance – which includes the Congress, as well as splintered groups of Shiv Sena and the Nationalist Congress Party (NCP) – won 30 of the state’s 48 seats. The Congress alone won 13 seats, while the BJP won nine.

Previous election results

Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s BJP and its right-wing predecessors have grown from political obscurity to dominating India’s parliament.

The BJP, which first came to power with a coalition government for just 13 days in 1996, subsequently ruled from 1998 to 2004.

But in 2004, it suffered a shock loss to a Congress-led coalition. The Congress – which had governed India for all but five years from independence until 1996 – ruled from 2004 to 2014 with its allies, under Prime Minister Manmohan Singh.

Then, in 2014, Modi and the BJP won a massive mandate to come to power. They improved their numbers in 2019.

Yet, other numbers slid in this period. Over the past decade under a majority BJP government, India has fallen on several democratic indices amid accusations of a crackdown on dissent, political opposition and media. Modi did not address any news conferences in the last decade as a prime minister.