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This transcript was created using speech recognition software. While it has been reviewed by human transcribers, it may contain errors. Please review the episode audio before quoting from this transcript and email transcripts@nytimes.com with any questions.

My name is Lydia Polgreen, and I’m an opinion columnist for “The New York Times.” I was a correspondent for “The New York Times” based in India. And I have continued to travel to India, keep up with friends there, and follow the news over the past decade.

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Last week, India announced the results of its parliamentary elections. And going into the election, as someone who’s been following India for quite some time, I had been expecting, and many other people who follow India had been expecting, that Narendra Modi, who’s been the prime minister of India for the past 10 years, and his polling has always been very strong as an individual, we had all been expecting that he was just going to kind of cakewalk into a third term as prime minister. And he was feeling so confident that he and his party had actually asked the electorate to not just re-elect him, but to re-elect him with a huge supermajority.

None of that happened. And I think this just came as a tremendous surprise to a lot of people. In fact, the party lost support, and they lost support to such an extent that Narendra Modi will not be able to form a government and be prime minister, just on his own, with his party. They’re going to have to find coalition partners. There’s very little doubt that he’s going to be able to do that. But he has really, really experienced a sharp rebuke. And I think it’s really a chastening sign for his brand of politics in India.

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This is a big year for democracy. There are dozens and dozens of elections happening all around the world. These elections are coming at a time when there’s a strong feeling that authoritarianism has really been on the march. Organizations like Freedom House, which kind of monitor the strength of democracy globally, this is the 18th year that they have measured freedom as being in decline in countries across the globe.

And India has actually been a really big part of that. India is a country where Narendra Modi and his party have enacted a bunch of policies that have limited freedom of the press, that have increased religious tensions, and jailing political opponents and other types of actions that have really kind of constrained the space of democracy in India.

So I think a lot of people were looking to this election in India to see which way is the wind blowing. Are voters going to ask for more of the same, or are they going to want change? And there was clearly a decisive vote for change. They sent a message that they wanted a very clear check on his power in government at this time.

It’s really important to remember Modi has really built his appeal on this idea of a kind of strong, muscular, Hindu-centric India. And India is a very diverse country. There are lots of different religious groups. There are lots of different linguistic groups. But Hindus are definitely the majority. And a lot of his appeal has been built on top of this idea that Hindus should rule India and should be in charge, and that restoring a kind of muscular, powerful, forward-leaning, almost ethnic nationalist posture for India was going to be a formula for success in the country.

And I think that what happened in this election is that voters, after 10 years, said, OK, what else? What else are you going to give us? We understand that you’ve delivered economic growth, but that economic growth is spread incredibly unequally. That growth is really strongly skewed to the very, very richest of Indians. You have huge masses of people in rural India, which is where the majority of Indians still live, where they are just not feeling the effects of that economic growth.

And at the same time, they’re experiencing rising prices, and especially rising prices for basic things like food. And so, on some very basic terms. I think it’s a little bit of, kind of, “show me the money.” Where are the results? We’ve seen all the rhetoric, but ultimately, are our day-to-day lives getting better? Do we have jobs? Are we able to afford food? Are prices going up. Those are the basic kind of nuts and bolts kitchen table issues that I think a........

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