Indian Voters Deliver Blow to Prime Minister Modi and BJP
India, the world’s largest democracy, recently concluded its and delivered a blow to the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), whose leader, Narendra Modi, has been prime minister for the past decade. The BJP won 240 seats, a plurality, which still allows it to lead, but via a coalition government in India’s parliamentary system.
The party won landslide majorities in 2014 and 2019, but the nation of 1.4 billion people seems to have lost some of its appetite for Modi’s brand of right-wing, Hindu-supremacist fundamentalism and neoliberal economic policies.
Amandeep Sandhu, a Punjabi writer, journalist, and author of several books, including Panjab: Journeys Through Fault Lines, spoke with YES! Senior Editor Sonali Kolhatkar on YES! Presents: Rising Up With Sonali from India about the election results. Sandhu’s 2022 story for YES! covered the Indian farmers’ protests.
Sonali Kolhatkar
joined YES! in summer 2021, building on a long and decorated career in broadcast and print journalism. She is an award-winning multimedia journalist, and host and creator of YES! Presents: Rising Up with Sonali, a nationally syndicated television and radio program airing on Free Speech TV and dozens of independent and community radio stations. She is also Senior Correspondent with the Independent Ƶ Institute’s Economy for All project where she writes a weekly column. She is the author of Rising Up: The Power of Narrative in Pursuing Racial Justice (2023) and Bleeding Afghanistan: Washington, Warlords, and the Propaganda of Silence (2005). Her forthcoming book is called Talking About Abolition (Seven Stories Press, 2025). Sonali is co-director of the nonprofit group, Afghan Women’s Mission which she helped to co-found in 2000. She has a Master’s in Astronomy from the University of Hawai’i, and two undergraduate degrees in Physics and Astronomy from the University of Texas at Austin. Sonali reflects on “My Journey From Astrophysicist to Radio Host” in her 2014 of the same name.
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