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My name is Lydia Polgreen, and I’m an opinion columnist for “The New York Times.” I was a correspondent for “The New York Times” based in India. And I have continued to travel to India, keep up with friends there, and follow the news over the past decade.

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Last week, India announced the results of its parliamentary elections. And going into the election, as someone who’s been following India for quite some time, I had been expecting, and many other people who follow India had been expecting, that Narendra Modi, who’s been the prime minister of India for the past 10 years, and his polling has always been very strong as an individual, we had all been expecting that he was just going to kind of cakewalk into a third term as prime minister. And he was feeling so confident that he and his party had actually asked the electorate to not just re-elect him, but to re-elect him with a huge supermajority.

None of that happened. And I think this just came as a tremendous surprise to a lot of people. In fact, the party lost support, and they lost support to such an extent that Narendra Modi will not be able to form a government and be prime minister, just on his own, with his party. They’re going to have to find coalition partners. There’s very little doubt that he’s going to be able to do that. But he has really, really experienced a sharp rebuke. And I think it’s really a chastening sign for his brand of politics in India.

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This is a big year for democracy. There are dozens and dozens of elections happening all around the world. These elections are coming at a time when there’s a strong feeling that authoritarianism has really been on the march. Organizations like Freedom House, which kind of monitor the strength of democracy globally, this is the 18th year that they have measured freedom as being in decline in countries across the globe.

And India has actually been a really big part of that. India is a country where Narendra Modi and his party have enacted a bunch of policies that have limited freedom of the press, that have increased religious tensions, and jailing political opponents and other types of actions that have really kind of constrained the space of democracy in India.

So I think a lot of people were looking to this election in India to see which way is the wind blowing. Are voters going to ask for more of the same, or are they going to want change? And there was clearly a decisive vote for change. They sent a message that they wanted a very clear check on his power in government at this time.

It’s really important to remember Modi has really built his appeal on this idea of a kind of strong, muscular, Hindu-centric India. And India is a very diverse country. There are lots of different religious groups. There are lots of different linguistic groups. But Hindus are definitely the majority. And a lot of his appeal has been built on top of this idea that Hindus should rule India and should be in charge, and that restoring a kind of muscular, powerful, forward-leaning, almost ethnic nationalist posture for India was going to be a formula for success in the country.

And I think that what happened in this election is that voters, after 10 years, said, OK, what else? What else are you going to give us? We understand that you’ve delivered economic growth, but that economic growth is spread incredibly unequally. That growth is really strongly skewed to the very, very richest of Indians. You have huge masses of people in rural India, which is where the majority of Indians still live, where they are just not feeling the effects of that economic growth.

And at the same time, they’re experiencing rising prices, and especially rising prices for basic things like food. And so, on some very basic terms. I think it’s a little bit of, kind of, “show me the money.” Where are the results? We’ve seen all the rhetoric, but ultimately, are our day-to-day lives getting better? Do we have jobs? Are we able to afford food? Are prices going up. Those are the basic kind of nuts and bolts kitchen table issues that I think a lot of Indian voters were focused on.

So I wanted to just mention one place that I think illustrates what has happened to Modi and his support, and that’s the city of Ayodhya. Modi chose to have a kind of unofficial kickoff of his campaign in Ayodhya. And Ayodhya is a very important place for a number of reasons, but it is believed by many Hindus to be the birthplace of Lord Ram, who is a very important deity in the Hindu constellation of gods.

But on the very spot where some Hindus believe that Ram was born, there was also a mosque for many years. And this had been a real kind of religious flashpoint for a long time in India. And one of the core platforms of Modi and his party has been that they were going to build a temple to Lord Ram on this spot.

I had been to Ayodhya before. I actually went there in 2009 after the government had issued this big report about communal tensions there. And this had been a place where there had been a contestation between Hindus and Muslims for many, many years, and in the aftermath of the destruction of the mosque there.

And I had noticed that there really wasn’t a lot of hoopla on the spot. People just weren’t that focused on these inter-communal religious tensions. So you fast forward to Narendra Modi in 2024, basically kicking off his campaign with the opening of this new temple complex. And I thought, oh, that’s a really, really dramatic transformation.

But it was really interesting to me that when the election results were announced, in the city of Ayodhya itself, his party actually lost that seat. So not only did they lose a huge number of seats across that entire state, but in the very place where Modi had gone to have this kind of triumphant moment of proving that he could deliver on his promises, that he is a man of his word, that he’s a master builder, that he’s going to vault the country forward. That in that very place, they lost the election, felt to me like it really underscored the trend in the dynamic that was happening in this vote.

I think the thing that I take away from this election is that you should never assume that the trend lines are going to stay the same. And you should also never assume that all is lost.

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One of the things that really impressed me, just following the coverage and really looking closely after we learned the result, was how assiduously the opposition, A, managed to come together and stay united. But they also, I think, stayed really focused on kitchen table issues.

And while a lot of people, I think, really do care about Indian democracy and care about the preservation of freedom of speech and secularism and all of these kinds of things that are enshrined in the Constitution, the reality is that Indian voters, like voters everywhere, they’re voting based on their interests. They’re voting based on the things that are most proximate to them and the concerns that are most animating for them.

And I think you really saw the opposition in India focusing on those kinds of issues and just relentlessly talking about unemployment, relentlessly talking about inflation, talking about the failure to deliver for the poor. And that message clearly won out at the end of the day. And I think the big takeaway for me is that — and I think this is something that political parties here in the United States should really be thinking about — is that sometimes you just have to meet voters where they are, and you have to focus on the issues that they care about most.

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