BJP wins India’s biggest state
NEW DELHI: Narendra Modi’s party won a landslide victory in India’s most populous state on Saturday in a massive vote of confidence for the prime minister halfway into his first term.
Modi’s Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) won a surprise absolute majority in Uttar Pradesh (UP) in the north, which is home to 220 million people and seen as a key indicator of national politics.
Party leader Amit Shah called the win a “historic mandate” for the BJP, which also won a majority in the mountainous northern state of Uttarakhand, and claimed it would be able to form governments in Goa and Manipur.
“These results will set Indian politics in a new direction,” he said at a press conference at the party’s New Delhi headquarters.
“The faith that people have placed in the BJP and in Narendra Modi will pay off.”
The BJP won 311 of the total 403 seats in UP according to the figures on the election commission website and is expected to name its chief minister for the state on Sunday.
The party had been expected to perform well in UP, but few experts had predicted the scale of the victory in elections across five states viewed as a test of Modi’s popularity after a controversial ban on high-value banknotes.
Modi’s dominance has been largely unchallenged since he won the first overall majority in three decades in the 2014 general election on a pledge to wipe out corruption and kickstart the economy.
He already looks well-placed for re-election in 2019 over the center-left Congress Party, which the BJP ousted from power in 2014.
In UP Congress ran in an alliance with the locally ruling Samajwadi Party (SP), but were trailing in a distant second.
Experts said the results showed Modi had succeeded in tapping into popular anger over corruption with the move, which was aimed at tackling tax evasion but also led to widespread chaos in a country where most transactions are cash- based.
“Modi played the populist card better than the other parties, including the ostensibly socialist parties like the SP and the Congress,” said veteran political journalist Parsa Venkateshwar Rao.
“He sold the rhetoric of demonetization as being anti- rich very well. I personally think demonetization was a great folly, but in politics you can turn a bad economic decision into a great political play.”
The BJP also made big gains in the northeastern state of Manipur, which shares a border with Myanmar and has long been plagued by separatist unrest. The party won 21 of the 60 seats in the state, where it previously held none, behind Congress on 28.
Congress won in the northern state of Punjab, where it fended off a challenge from the fledgeling Aam Aadmi Party (AAP).
It was unclear who would form the next governments in Manipur and in Goa, where the Congress also led with 17 of the state’s 40 seats, but fell short of a majority.