Turnout: 66.11%
About this election
The 2024 Indian general election — the eighteenth Lok Sabha election — was held in seven phases between 19 April and 1 June 2024, with results declared on 4 June. The outcome defied the dominant pre-election narrative: the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), which most polls and analysts had projected to win 370 to 400 seats in a historic supermajority, fell to 240 — well below the 272 required for an outright majority. The opposition INDIA alliance won 234 seats, far more than the 150 that most surveys had forecast. The BJP's National Democratic Alliance (NDA) held together with 293 seats — enough to form a government — but Narendra Modi's third term began as a coalition government for the first time in his decade as Prime Minister, dependent on partners including the Telugu Desam Party (TDP, 16 seats) and Janata Dal (United) (JDU, 12 seats) for his majority. Modi was sworn in for a third term on 9 June 2024.
India uses a first-past-the-post (FPTP) system for all 543 Lok Sabha constituencies. The disproportionality of FPTP is particularly acute in a country with many parties and highly diverse regional preferences: a modest shift in vote share between two evenly matched parties can transfer dozens of seats, while parties whose votes are spread thinly across many constituencies may win millions of votes but few seats. In 2024 this dynamic worked against the BJP: in Uttar Pradesh, where the Samajwadi Party concentrated its appeal among OBC and Muslim voters, the SP won 37 seats on roughly a third of UP's vote while the BJP fell from 62 to 33 on roughly 42%. The 543-seat Lok Sabha requires 272 for a simple majority; the President invites the leader of the largest parliamentary group most likely to command that majority to form a government.
The BJP entered the election confident of a supermajority. Modi launched the campaign with the Ayodhya Ram temple consecration in January 2024 as a symbolic backdrop and ran on a platform of "Modi ki guarantee" — a personalised pledge on welfare continuity, infrastructure expansion (expressways, airports, metro systems) and economic growth. The party's slogan "abki baar, 400 paar" (this time, past 400) projected an expectation of a historic victory that would give the government a two-thirds majority to amend the constitution — a framing that the opposition successfully weaponised by warning that such a majority would be used to scrap reservations (affirmative-action quotas) for scheduled castes and scheduled tribes.
The INDIA alliance, formed in 2023 and comprising Congress, the Samajwadi Party, the Aam Aadmi Party (in some states), the Trinamool Congress, the DMK and smaller regional parties, ran its most coordinated opposition campaign since 2004. Rahul Gandhi's second Bharat Jodo Nyay Yatra (a march from Manipur to Mumbai in January-February 2024) revitalised Congress's grassroots presence and put unemployment, inequality and "saving the constitution" at the heart of the Congress message. The alliance made significant seat-sharing deals: crucially, in Uttar Pradesh the SP and Congress divided constituencies to avoid splitting the anti-BJP vote.
The Samajwadi Party's surge in Uttar Pradesh was the single biggest story of the election: the SP and its allies won 37 of UP's 80 seats, while the BJP fell from 62 to 33 and Congress won 6. The SP's Akhilesh Yadav had built a coalition of OBC groups, Dalits and Muslims that the BJP's welfare spending and Hindutva messaging could not fully counter. Maharashtra — where the ruling Mahayuti (NDA) comprised rival factions of both the Shiv Sena and the NCP — suffered badly: the INDIA-aligned factions (Shiv Sena UBT + NCP-SP) outperformed their NDA counterparts, and Congress won 13 seats in the state. The BJP held firm in its western and central heartland: it won all 29 seats in Madhya Pradesh, 25 of 26 in Gujarat, and swept Delhi and Uttarakhand. Congress posted its best result since 2009 with 99 seats — Rahul Gandhi himself won from Wayanad (Kerala) and Rae Bareli (UP) — though the party's per-vote-seat ratio remained very low by international standards. The DMK swept 22 of Tamil Nadu's 39 seats; West Bengal's TMC took 29; Odisha's BJP won 20 as the BJD collapsed. Turnout fell slightly to 66.1%.
The 2024 election followed ten years of BJP dominance — the first back-to-back parliamentary majorities for any party since the early Congress era. The decade had brought rapid infrastructure investment, a sharp Hindu nationalist cultural politics, consolidation of power in the executive, and a foreign policy that balanced ties with the West against continued engagement with Russia. Opposition critics had raised sustained concerns about press freedom, the use of investigating agencies against opposition politicians, judicial independence and the erosion of minority rights. Economically, headline GDP growth remained strong but a "K-shaped" recovery — with formal-sector and corporate profits rising while rural wages and informal employment lagged — had widened the BJP's political vulnerabilities in agrarian constituencies.
Modi's third-term government, sworn in on 9 June 2024, faces a structurally different parliamentary environment. The Union Budget of July 2024 notably increased allocations to Andhra Pradesh and Bihar — the home states of TDP and JDU respectively — reflecting the need to keep coalition partners satisfied. The opposition's better-than-expected showing emboldened Rahul Gandhi, who became Leader of the Opposition in the Lok Sabha for the first time, giving him a constitutionally recognised platform. The Maharashtra state assembly election in November 2024 saw the NDA coalition recover decisively, reasserting BJP dominance in India's economic capital. India's next general election is due by mid-2029.
Election Commission of India — results.eci.gov.in.
Compiled and reviewed by Bartłomiej Paruzel, Election Data Analyst, from official results. See our data methodology.