Narendra Modi sworn in as India’s prime minister for third term

Hindu nationalist leader Narendra Modi was sworn in this Sunday as Prime Minister of India for a historic third consecutive term, in which he will have to govern in a coalition for the first time after close elections in which his party did not obtain a majority.

Modi was sworn in as head of the new Government during a ceremony at the presidential residence, attended by several heads of state and prime ministers of Indian allied nations.

In addition to Modi, the ministers of the future cabinet will be sworn in, although it is still unknown which portfolio each will hold.

The former Minister of the Interior, Amit Shah, the last Minister of Foreign Affairs, Subrahmanyam Jaishankar, and the former Minister of Finance, Nirmala Sitharaman, will be some of the well-known faces of the new Government.

This is the third consecutive term for Modi, who first came to power in 2014 and was re-elected in 2019. On both occasions, The president governed alone thanks to the majorities that his partythe Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), won in the Lower House of Parliament or Lok Sabha.

However, the 240 seats that the BJP won in the recent general elections were insufficient to reach the 272 seats that provide a parliamentary majority, so Modi was forced to seek the support of his coalition partners National Democratic Alliance (NDA). ), which leads the BJP.

Those responsible for this alliance, which totaled some 290 seats, unanimously elected Modi as their leader for the new legislature last Wednesday, giving him free rein to govern the largest democracy on the planet again.

In exchange, however, The BJP granted more than a dozen ministries to the rest of the NDA partiesaccording to the Indian Express newspaper.

The ceremony was attended by seven political leaders from India’s allied nations: the presidents of Sri Lanka, Ranil Wickremesinghe, and Maldives, Mohamed Muizzu; the vice president of Seychelles, Ahmed Afif; or the prime ministers of Bangladesh, Sheikh Hasina, Nepal, Pushpa Kamal Dahal, Bhutan, Tshering Tobgay and Mauritius, Pravind Kumar Jugnauth.

With his third consecutive term, Modi equals the record of Jawaharlal Nehru, the first president of India after independence from the British Empire in 1947, and who governed the country for three uninterrupted terms until his death in 1964.