India’s 2019 general elections could have redirected the country’s politics from the trajectory it had been hurtling on for the past five years. There had been some wishful thinking that if the electorate replaced the ruling pro-Hindu party, the country’s strength — its plurality — would have been protected.

But the election’s outcome was different. In a historic man-date, Prime Minister Narendra Modi was given a second term to run the world’s largest democracy. Modi is the first Prime Minister since 1971 to return to power with an absolute majority. He is the third one to do so after the country’s first Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru and his daughter Indira Gandhi.

In the recent elections, Modi’s pro-Hindu Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) garnered 303 seats while with his allies it has 353 seats in the 545-member Lok Sabha, the lower house of parliament.

The question now for many Indians is: What comes next?

“A new battle for the idea of India begins today,” wrote Shiv Visvanathan in The Hindu on May 24 when the election results were declared.

To some the ‘battle’ is one picked by a BJP leadership that seeks to subvert the secular principles of the Indian constitution, a foundation that allows religious and ethnic plurality to breathe in the country.

The main apprehension among religious minority leaders and a section of left-liberals has been that the BJP could change the constitution to discard the parliamentary system.