Narendra Modi could respond to disappointment in two different ways

The Indian voter has confounded expectations again. A decade ago, when Narendra Modi swept to power with an outright majority in parliament, a quarter-century of messy coalition politics came to an end. When his Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) expanded that majority to 353 of the 543 seats in the lower house five years later, many pundits hailed the dawn of a new “dominant-party system” akin to independent India’s first three decades, when the Congress party ruled without interruption.