Voters speak: The electoral verdict has a clear message for the NDA government

livemint.com:

Results of the recently concluded general election for the Lok Sabha have given the National Democratic Alliance (NDA) a clear mandate to form the government for a third successive term, although there is also a message for it in the sharply reduced seats it now holds. The principal party in this alliance, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), won only 240 seats, lower than the required 272 for a House majority, while the BJP had a majority of its own supporting the past two governments. While it may not hamper the smooth functioning of the government, the decline of BJP MPs in the Lok Sabha was unexpected, given that pollsters as well as the party had claimed a likely increase in its tally.

Voting preferences of the electorate depend on many factors and any analysis of the election results must be done with the caveat that economic issues, though important, are only one of the many factors that determine choices. However, given that salient economic issues such as inflation, unemployment, agrarian distress and inequality were raised by almost all parties, election results do offer us some idea of the perceptions of the electorate on these issues. There are four clear messages.

First, rural distress is not just a statistical artefact, but real. The fact that the BJP’s seat losses were concentrated in semi-urban and rural areas suggests that distress played a role. Part of it was in the agrarian economy, which has seen large farmer protests throughout the last five years (10 years in some areas).

The NDA lost seats in Punjab, Haryana and western Uttar Pradesh, which were the epicentre of these protests. It also suffered losses in Bihar and Maharashtra for it. While multiple data sources confirmed the nature of rural and