| Summary/Abstract |
On the surface, Narendra Modi has had a dream run in his first year as India’s prime minister. In May 2014, his Hinduright Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) won 281 of the 543 seats in the Lok Sabha, the lower house of Parliament. This marked the first time since Rajiv Gandhi’s victory of 1984 that a party won a clear majority of its own and did not need coalition partners to form a government. After this triumph, Modi managed to install his trusted lieutenant, Amit Shah—who ran the interior ministry in Gujarat when Modi was chief minister of the state—as president of the BJP. Together with Shah, he has since gone on to win important state elections in Haryana, Maharashtra, and Jharkhand. In Jammu and Kashmir, the BJP did spectacularly well in the December 2014 elections and is now in government as part of the ruling coalition headed by the Peoples’ Democratic Party.
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