The Results of India’s 2014 General Election

On May 16, after a five-week-long election, the Indian election results were declared. The Bharatiya Janata Party, led by its prime ministerial candidate Narendra Modi, won a majority on its own. It will thus form the first non-Congress-party non-coalition government in Indian history. This election result will help determine the direction that the world’s largest democracy will take over the next five years. Given India’s sheer size, its growing regional and global role and its increasing interaction and integration with the global economy, the impact of the elections is likely to be felt well beyond India’s borders.

On May 19, The India Project at Brookings hosted a discussion reviewing the outcome of the national elections. Panelists broke down the results, reviewing the seat and vote shares and analyzing the message that voters have sent to India’s political parties. They also assessed what a new government headed by Mr. Modi might look like, what mandate it has received and its likely policy priorities, as well as the potential impact of the election results on Indian economic and foreign policy, including U.S.-India relations.

Panelists included Sadanand Dhume, resident fellow at American Enterprise Institute; Dhruva Jaishankar, Transatlantic Fellow for Asia Studies at the German Marshall Fund of the United States; Richard Rossow, the Wadhwani Chair in U.S.-India Policy Studies at the Center for Strategic and International Studies; and Milan Vaishnav, an associate in the South Asia program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. Tanvi Madan, fellow in foreign policy and director of the India Project at Brookings, will moderate the discussion.

Join the conversation on Twitter using #IndiaElections