Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi was set for a historic third term on Tuesday, but with a vastly diminished majority in a rare electoral setback for a leader who has held a tight grip on the nation’s politics, Reuters reported.

Modi’s ruling Bharatiya Janata Party lost its own majority in parliament for the first time in a decade and is dependent on its regional allies to get past the half-way mark required to run the world’s largest democracy.

For Modi whose approval ratings have been the highest among world leaders and who ran a presidential-style campaign, such a result is the first sign of the ground shifting.

“For the BJP to drop below the majority mark, this is a personal setback for him,” said Yogendra Yadav, a psephologist and the founder of a small political group opposed to the BJP.

Since he took power 10 years ago, riding his Hindu nationalist base, Modi has been the ruling alliance’s unquestioned leader, with concerns growing about what his opponents see as the country’s slide towards authoritarianism, read the report.

The man who as a boy sold tea in his home state of Gujarat has dominated India’s politics so completely in the last decade that few in his party or even the parent ideological group, the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, dare stand up to him.

Indeed, throughout the campaign in scorching heat, it was Modi with his thinning white hair, a neatly trimmed white beard and immaculate Indian attire who towered over everyone else.

His giant cutouts were everywhere, his face on television screens every day as he courted India’s 968 million voters with a personal “Modi guarantee” to change their lives.

“My sole issue with Modi today is that he has become larger than the party itself,” said Surendra Kumar Dwivedi, a former head of the Department of Political Science at Lucknow University “In a democratic system… a party should always supersede an individual.”

‘LAST 10 YEARS IS ONLY A PREVIEW’

Still, Modi will be only the second leader to win a third term after founding prime minister Jawaharlal Nehru and has promised a transformative next five years.

Under him, India has become the world’s fastest growing major economy and he has said he wants to make it the world’s third largest in three years, behind the United States and China.

“What we have done in the last 10 years is only a preview, a trailer,” Modi told a recent rally. “We have a lot more to do. Modi is taking the country to a different level in the world.”

The BJP has dismissed opposition speculation that Modi, 73, might hang up his boots once he reaches 75, like some other party leaders have done in recent years. Modi has said he wants to lay the groundwork for India to become a fully developed nation by 2047, the 100th year of independence from British colonial rule, read the report.

“Modi will now probably enter in what I call the legacy phase of his prime ministership, driving India forward politically, economically, diplomatically and even militarily,” said Bilveer Singh, deputy head, department of political science, at the National University of Singapore.

The idea would be to make the country a “strong regional power that is also a counterbalance to China, but not to serve Western interest as is sometimes alleged, but mainly to promote India’s interest, power and place in international politics”.

A reduced mandate for Modi’s ruling alliance forecloses the possibility of changes to India’s secular constitution that opposition groups had warned against. Any such measures require the support of two-thirds of members of parliament.

Concerns have grown in recent years that the BJP’s Hindu nationalist agenda has polarised the country with Modi himself turning up the rhetoric, accusing the main opposition Congress of appeasing Muslims for votes, Reuters reported.

Yashwant Deshmukh, founder of CVoter polling agency and a political analyst, said the BJP’s top goal of introducing common civil laws to replace Islam’s sharia-based customs and other religious codes would have to go on the back burner.

“These will have to be debated,” he said.

Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s alliance was winning a majority of seats in early vote counting trends in the general election on Tuesday, but well short of the landslide predicted in exit polls, TV channels showed.

The trends spooked financial markets which had expected a hefty win for Modi, with stocks falling steeply.

The rupee also fell sharply against the dollar and benchmark bond yields were up, Reuters reported.

The markets had soared on Monday after exit polls on June 1 projected Modi and his Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) would register a big victory, and its National Democratic Alliance (NDA) was seen getting a two-thirds majority and more.

At 0800 GMT, TV channels showed the NDA was ahead in nearly 300 of the 543 elective seats in parliament, where 272 is a simple majority. The opposition INDIA alliance led by Rahul Gandhi’s centrist Congress party was leading in over 220 seats, higher than expected.

TV channels showed BJP accounted for nearly 240 of the seats in which the NDA was leading, short of a majority on its own, compared to the 303 it won in 2019, Reuters reported.

A third Modi term with a slim majority for BJP – or having to depend on NDA allies for a majority – could introduce some uncertainty into governance as Modi has ruled with an authoritative hold over the government in the last decade.

However, politicians and analysts said it was too early to get a firm idea of the voting trends since a majority of ballots were yet to be counted.

However, if Modi’s victory is confirmed even by a slim margin, his BJP will have triumphed in a vitriolic campaign in which parties accused each other of religious bias and of posing a threat to sections of the population.

Iran’s hardline former president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has registered to run for president in the country’s June 28 election, organized after the death of President Ebrahim Raisi in a helicopter crash last month, Iran’s state television reported on Sunday.

However, Ahmadinejad could be barred from the race. The country’s cleric-led Guardian Council will vet candidates, and publish the list of qualified ones on June 11, Reuters reported.

Ahmadinejad, a former member of Iran’s elite Revolutionary Guards, was first elected as Iran’s president in 2005 and stepped down because of term limits in 2013.

He was barred from standing in the 2017 election by the Guardian Council, a year after Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei warned him that entering was “not in his interest and that of the country”.

A rift developed between the two after Ahmadinejad explicitly advocated checks on Khamenei’s ultimate authority.

In 2018, in a rare criticism directed at Khamenei, Ahmadinejad wrote to him calling for “free” elections.