Narendra Modi and the NDA’s 2004 and 2009 Election Defeats: What They Meant for His National Ambitions

Before Modi became BJP’s national face, the party lost two consecutive general elections under different leadership. Understanding those defeats helps explain why the party was eventually willing to bet its 2014 campaign so heavily on one relatively untested national figure. This article covers what happened in 2004 and 2009, while Modi himself was still serving as Gujarat’s Chief Minister, well away from the national campaign.

The 2004 Shock

Going into the 2004 general election, the ruling NDA, led by Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee, ran a campaign built around the slogan “India Shining,” designed to showcase what the coalition presented as a period of rapid economic transformation under its leadership. The result surprised most observers: the NDA won just 186 seats against the Congress-led alliance’s 222, an unexpected defeat for a government that had entered the campaign widely expected to win. Deccan Herald’s later retrospective on the campaign described the “India Shining” slogan itself as a strategic mistake, and post-election analysis at the time pointed to the campaign’s heavy emphasis on urban, middle-class economic gains as a key weakness, with commentators arguing the government had failed to adequately reach rural voters and had appeared, in the assessment of several analysts, too closely aligned with corporate interests rather than addressing everyday economic concerns for less affluent Indians.

The 2009 Setback

The BJP’s position weakened further in 2009. Contesting under Advani’s leadership, by then serving as the party’s prime ministerial candidate for that election, the BJP’s own seat count fell to 116, its second consecutive national defeat, according to Wikipedia’s summary of the party’s electoral history, and by most accounts a campaign that failed to generate the kind of enthusiasm the party needed against an incumbent Congress-led government. This election marked a significant transition point internally: it was Advani’s final general election campaign as the party’s central leadership figure, with day-to-day parliamentary leadership subsequently passing to a younger cohort, including Sushma Swaraj in the Lok Sabha and Arun Jaitley in the Rajya Sabha, in the years that followed.

A Party Searching for a New Direction

Two consecutive national defeats left the BJP in a genuinely uncertain position by the early 2010s, having now lost three general elections in a row counting 2004, 2009, and factoring in the party’s earlier exit from government in that period, without an obvious next-generation national leader who could rebuild the kind of broad electoral coalition it had enjoyed in the late 1990s. This backdrop, a party that had lost its way nationally after Vajpayee’s retirement from active leadership and Advani’s own campaign having fallen short, is the specific context in which Modi’s Gujarat record and organisational reputation, built over more than a decade as Chief Minister, started to look like a genuinely different kind of option to the party’s central leadership.

Connecting the Dots to 2013

This history helps explain, in concrete terms, why the party was willing to make the contested bet covered in our separate article on Modi’s 2013 campaign-chief appointment. A party that had just lost two elections in a row, and had genuine doubts about its existing leadership pipeline, had a much stronger practical incentive to elevate an outside-Delhi state leader with a strong record and no direct responsibility for those two national defeats than a party riding high on recent electoral success would have had.

What the Party Tried in Between

Between the 2009 defeat and Modi’s 2013 elevation, the BJP experimented with an interim national leadership structure built more around parliamentary floor leaders than a single face for the party as a whole, with Sushma Swaraj and Arun Jaitley taking on prominent public roles as Leader of the Opposition in the Lok Sabha and Rajya Sabha respectively during this period. This arrangement kept the party functioning as an effective opposition through the 2009 to 2014 Parliament, but it didn’t produce the kind of single, nationally recognisable prime ministerial figure the party judged it needed to actually win back government, which is part of why the 2013 shift toward Modi represented such a distinct change in approach rather than a natural continuation of this interim structure.

A Decade Bookended by Two Different Outcomes

Viewed as a full decade, the arc from 2004 to 2014 traces a fairly complete cycle: a governing coalition voted out unexpectedly, a further defeat under a different leader, an extended period of interim parliamentary leadership without a clear national figure, and finally a decisive turn to an outside candidate whose record was built entirely at the state level. Few major Indian political comebacks have covered quite that much organisational ground in a single ten-year stretch.

Bottom Line

The NDA’s 2004 and 2009 defeats, under Vajpayee and then Advani respectively, left the BJP without a clear national direction for nearly a decade, a period of genuine uncertainty that forms the essential backdrop to understanding why the party eventually turned to Modi’s Gujarat record and organisational reputation for its 2014 campaign, rather than his rise happening in isolation from this earlier history.

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Abhyudaya Verma