NDA Coalition Management: How Modi Keeps Allies Together

The 2024 general election marked a genuine structural shift for Modi’s government: for the first time since he became Prime Minister in 2014, BJP alone fell short of a parliamentary majority, making coalition partners essential rather than optional. This article covers how that dependency has actually shaped governance since.

The 2024 Numbers That Changed Everything

BJP won 240 seats in the 2024 general election, down sharply from 303 in 2019, while the full National Democratic Alliance coalition secured 293 seats against a majority threshold of 272, with the Telugu Desam Party contributing 16 seats and the Janata Dal (United) contributing 12, making these two parties collectively essential to the government’s parliamentary survival in a way neither had been during BJP’s two preceding terms of outright majority government. President Droupadi Murmu confirmed Modi’s support from 293 members of Parliament on June 7, 2024, beginning his third term as head of a coalition government for the first time in his premiership.

Modest Cabinet Representation, Outsized Leverage

Despite their critical role in the government’s parliamentary arithmetic, reported cabinet-berth allocations gave JD(U) and TDP comparatively modest shares, each holding a small single-digit percentage of overall cabinet positions, with BJP retaining the large majority of ministerial berths, an allocation pattern that reflects a broader negotiating dynamic: these allies’ influence has shown up less in the raw number of ministries they control and more in specific policy concessions and budget allocations directed toward their states.

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Bihar and Andhra Pradesh: Where the Money Went

The government’s approach to coalition management has been visible in targeted fiscal commitments to the two states these allies govern. Andhra Pradesh, under TDP leader N. Chandrababu Naidu, who became Chief Minister for a fourth term in June 2024 after his alliance won a dominant majority in the state’s own assembly election, received central government support for reviving Amaravati as the state’s capital, including capital-gains tax exemptions on related land transactions and the release of a substantial share of an approved central allocation toward the project. Bihar, under JD(U) leader Nitish Kumar, who rejoined the NDA in January 2024 after breaking from a rival coalition and was later sworn in for a tenth term as Chief Minister following the state’s 2025 assembly election, has similarly seen the central government direct specific infrastructure and development funding toward the state, commitments widely read by political commentators as part of maintaining the coalition’s stability.

The Waqf Bill: A Genuine Test of Ally Loyalty

One of the clearer tests of this coalition arrangement came with the Waqf (Amendment) Bill, which JD(U) and TDP both publicly supported in the Lok Sabha, with both parties framing their support specifically around transparency in Waqf property administration rather than interference with mosques, a position that put both parties in some tension with their own efforts to court Muslim voters in Bihar and Andhra Pradesh respectively, a genuine point of political exposure for both allies that opposition parties and some minority-community leaders specifically highlighted as a contradiction.

The Caste Census Decision

The Union Cabinet’s decision in 2025 to include caste enumeration in the country’s next census is widely read by political commentators as at least partly responsive to years of pressure specifically from JD(U) and from Bihar’s own state-level caste survey conducted in 2023, alongside broader pressure from the opposition INDIA bloc, which had long demanded a national caste census. BJP has publicly framed the decision as consistent with the party’s own positions, while opposition parties including Congress and the RJD have argued the government was adopting an agenda those parties had championed first, illustrating how ally pressure and opposition pressure can sometimes point toward the same eventual policy outcome even as the parties involved dispute who deserves credit.

The Structural Risk Going Forward

This coalition arrangement carries an inherent structural vulnerability that didn’t exist during BJP’s two preceding terms of outright majority: any sufficiently contentious future legislation, particularly on issues like a Uniform Civil Code or further changes to religious or minority-community law, carries a real risk of testing JD(U) and TDP’s continued support in a way that simply wasn’t a governing constraint when BJP held its own outright majority in 2014 and 2019, a dynamic that has made coalition-management considerations a more visible factor in the government’s legislative calculations since 2024 than at any point earlier in Modi’s tenure.

Also read: When State Schemes Overlap With Central Schemes: How It's Managed

The Speaker’s Chair as an Early Signal

An early, closely watched test of coalition dynamics came with the election of the Lok Sabha Speaker in June 2024, a position with genuine institutional significance since the Speaker also has a decisive role in the event of a future no-confidence motion or defection-related disqualification proceedings. BJP’s Om Birla secured the post via voice vote, with the opposition’s candidate not pressing for a formal division, a relatively smooth outcome for the government that some political commentators noted was itself an early signal of the coalition’s basic stability, since a Speaker election contested more aggressively by coalition allies seeking the post for themselves would have signalled considerably greater internal coalition tension than what actually played out.

The Comparison to the Vajpayee-Era Coalition

This coalition-management challenge, covered in more detail in our companion article on the Vajpayee-Advani era, gives the current government access to institutional memory and experience that BJP’s own senior leadership can draw on, since managing a genuinely multi-party coalition with real bargaining leverage on the government’s side is not an entirely new experience for the party’s older leadership generation, even if it represents a significant departure from the two preceding terms of outright majority rule that most of the party’s current mid-level leadership has only ever known.

Bottom Line

Since the 2024 election left BJP short of a majority on its own, Modi’s government has managed its dependence on JD(U) and TDP through a combination of modest but functional cabinet representation, substantial targeted fiscal commitments to Bihar and Andhra Pradesh, and careful positioning on legislation like the Waqf Amendment Bill, where both allies’ public support required navigating real tension with their own Muslim-voter outreach. This coalition-dependent structure, a genuine departure from BJP’s two preceding terms of outright majority government, has introduced a level of ally-management consideration into the government’s legislative calculations not present at any earlier point in Modi’s premiership.

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Abhyudaya Verma