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Nitish Kumar and Telugu Desam Party (TDP) President N Chandrababu Naidu, whose support is crucial to the government and its stability, attended the NDA meeting. Top leaders of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) and its other allies were also present.

Both Kumar and Naidu handed over formal letters to Modi, declaring their support for him as PM.

Kumar’s party won 12 seats and the Naidu-led TDP, the second largest party in the NDA, bagged 16. The support of both the parties is vital to prop up the Modi dispensation.

Earlier yesterday, NDA leaders met at Modi’s residence to review the election result and discuss the government formation, after which a delegation of senior figures from the BJP and its NDA partners was supposed to meet President Droupadi Murmu at Rashtrapati Bhavan to stake claim to power.

With Modi’s BJP failing to secure a majority on its own in the parliamentary election and looking up to NDA allies for support, the shape of national politics and governance at the Centre will be impacted. The electoral verdict has taken India back to the tricky terrains of coalition politics after a decade.

Ever since he became the prime minister for the first time in 2014, Modi has enjoyed the cushion of a comfortable BJP majority in the Lok Sabha and a much-weakened opposition.

With that cushion now gone, he will need considerable support from its allies like TDP, Janata Dal, and Eknath Shinde’s faction of Shiv Sena.

However, the first challenge for BJP now would be to keep the NDA intact with a numerically resurgent opposition INDIA bloc snapping at its heels and not giving up the idea of cobbling together a majority in the Lok Sabha.

Both Naidu and Kumar are old hands in playing coalition politics and have switched sides a number of times. The allies will look to drive hard bargains and extract their pounds of flesh as the government formation exercise is set into motion. This raises questions about their reliability.

The allies are expected to push BJP for a common minimum programme in the coming days. It is quite possible that BJP is forced to put its ideological core issues, like a nationwide uniform civil code, on the back-burner.

Sources said a variety of “demands”, including special status for their states and a pick of ministerial berths, are on the table in talks between Modi, Kumar and Naidu. There are chances Modi will feel the often-conflicting pulls of coalition politics.

On the other hand, Nitish Kumar is likely to insist on conducting a countrywide caste census, an issue Congress and INDIA parties have also been flagging to give reservation on the basis of numerical strength of the backward populace. This is particularly important for Kumar, who faces a fresh assembly election in his home state.

Meanwhile, passing laws in parliament will require Modi to go for a consensual approach across the political spectrum -- something he is not used to.

Naidu, who contested the Lok Sabha polls and the assembly polls in Andhra Pradesh in alliance with BJP, and actor-turned-politician Pawan Kalyan of JanaSena party, had been kingmakers on many occasions in the past.

In 1996, when the Lok Sabha election produced a hung parliament, it was Naidu, as the convenor of the United Front (a coalition of parties not aligned with either Congress or BJP), who propped up the HD Deve Gowda government with outside support from Congress. A few months later, he also played a key role in forming the government at the Centre with Inder Kumar Gujral at the helm.

In 1999, Naidu contested the Lok Sabha polls in alliance with BJP and secured 29 seats. He backed the then Atal Bihari Vajpayee government, which was short of the majority mark. However, TDP did not join the government.

On the other hand, Nitish Kumar was, for a short period, the railways minister, surface transport minister and agriculture minister in the Vajpayee government from 1998 to 1999. He got the portfolio again in the Vajpayee government of 2000-2004.

Critics have accused Modi of having authoritarian streaks in the past. But when he assumes office in the coming days as head of the NDA coalition, can he live down that image and reinvent himself as a consensual leader who takes onboard his allies?