India’s Ruling Hindu Nationalists Suffer Blow in State Elections
India’s ruling party lost power in three key states on Tuesday, dealing Prime Minister Narendra Modi his biggest defeat since he took office in 2014 and boosting the opposition ahead of general elections next year.
The results in the northern states of Rajasthan, Chhattisgarh and Madhya Pradesh could force the federal government run by Mr Modi’s Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) to raise spending in the countryside, where more than two-thirds of India’s 1.3 billion people live.
Political analysts said the BJP’s defeat underscores rural dismay with the government and could help unite the opposition led by the Congress party.
Mr Modi government’s decision to ban high denomination currency notes and botched implementation of a federal Goods and Services Tax (GST) last year, analyst Sajjan Singh said, was “a suicidal move”, which brought “unimagined difficulties upon rural and weaker sections”.
“The cash-based rural and informal sector economy which sustains a large part of the Indian society has been destroyed,” Mr Singh told
Sanjay Jha, spokesperson of the Congress party, said that farmers’ distress, joblessness of the youth and rising inequalities in the society were the main agenda during the elections.
He told that the attacks on the Dalits and the minorities under BJP governments also made electorate turn away from the right-wing party.
Dozens of people, majority of them Muslims, have been killed by so-called cow vigilantes in the past four since Mr Modi took power. The Hindu nationalist party deployed Yogi Adityanath, known for his vitriolic anti-Muslims rhetoric, as the chief campaigner in the state elections.
Mr Adityanath, a monk-turned politician, was appointed the chief minister of India’s most populous and politically significant state of Uttar Pradesh in 2017.
A lawmaker for the BJP said it had erred in focusing its campaign on partisan themes, such as the building of a Hindu temple at a site disputed by Muslims, instead of offering jobs and growth. “We forgot the issue of development that Modi took up in 2014,” said Sanjay Kakade.
Mr Jha, the Congress spokesperson said: “The BJP has collapsed on the [issue of] governance… and just tried to polarise elections by playing communal politics.” Mr Modi late on Tuesday congratulated the Congress and other regional parties for their victories. “We accept the people’s mandate with humility,” he tweeted.
“Victory and defeat are an integral part of life. Today’s results will further our resolve to serve people and work even harder for the development of India.”
The Congress party is all set to form governments in the state of Chhattisgarh and Rajasthan after getting majority while it emerged as the single largest party in Madhya Pradesh state.
In Chhattisgarh, Congress won 68 of the 90 seats at stake, with the BJP managing to get 15, according to data from the Election Commission.
In Rajasthan, the Congress won 101 of the 199 seats contested, against 73 for the incumbent BJP. In Madhya Pradesh, the most important of the five states that have held assembly elections in recent weeks, Congress emerged victorious on 114 seats while the BJP managed to hold on to 108 out of 230 seats.
Two regional parties have already extended support to the Congress party boosting its chances of forming government after 15 years of BJP rule. The results came as a shot in the arm for Rahul Gandhi, president of the Congress party, who is trying to forge a broad alliance with regional groups and present Mr Modi with his most serious challenge yet in a general election due by May. Congress has ruled India for most of its post-independence era after 1947 but was decimated by Mr Modi’s BJP in national polls in 2014. Since then, it had struggled to make major inroads, even in state polls.
Mr Gandhi, the fourth generation scion of the Nehru-Gandhi dynasty, has sought to build a coalition of regional groups.