From the bleak newspaper headlines on June 4, you would have been forgiven for thinking that India’s prime minister, Narendra Modi, had lost the general election that concluded this month.

Winning his third consecutive term in office, Modi and his Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) were victorious in the largest election held in history and matched the record of Jawaharlal Nehru, the country’s founding prime minister. Nehru was the only previous leader in the nation’s history to win three straight mandates after India’s independence from Britain in 1947.