Regional vote setback points to vulnerability of India’s Modi, BJP

Prime minister concedes defeat in Bihar, faces criticism from own ranks

NEW DELHI— Prime Minister Narendra Modi of India suffered a severe political setback on Sunday when the voters of Bihar, the country’s third most populous state, overwhelmingly rejected Modi’s party in state assembly elections.

Modi, who had eagerly cast the Bihar elections as a referendum on his first 17 months as India’s leader, conceded defeat shortly after noon on Sunday.

Recriminations were swift within his Bharatiya Janata Party, or BJP. Some party leaders questioned whether Modi had erred in the closing weeks of the Bihar campaign by elevating hard-right appeals to Hindu nationalism over his traditional unifying message of vikas, or development, for all Indians.

Those appeals — in which Modi depicted his opponents as favouring Muslims and insulting cows, a revered Hindu holy symbol — fell flat in Bihar, a desperately poor state in eastern India where millions of people eke out a living as subsistence farmers without the basics of electricity, plumbing or even two meals a day.

While pollsters had predicted a close election, the actual results were anything but: the BJP and its allies won less than half as many seats in the 243-member state assembly as the “grand alliance” of parties that joined forces to oppose Modi.

One prominent political analyst, Shekhar Gupta, summed up the lesson of the election this way: “Mr. Modi is beatable.”

The defeat also means that Modi will enter the winter session of Parliament without the political momentum to force through major overhauls of taxation, labour rules and land use that he sees as critical to accelerating India’s growth and attracting more foreign investors.

The battle for Bihar played out against a raging national debate over whether Modi’s India is becoming increasingly intolerant of secularists, Muslims and political dissent in general. According to the police, four Muslims were attacked and killed by mobs of Hindus in the past six weeks because they were suspected of stealing, smuggling or slaughtering cows.

Hundreds of writers, filmmakers, scientists and academics have protested what they see as rising intolerance by signing petitions or returning awards they had received from government-supported bodies.

“This is a victory of unity over divisiveness. Humility over arrogance,” Rahul Gandhi, a member of the grand alliance, said in a statement. Mamata Banerjee, the chief minister of West Bengal, called the election a “defeat of intolerance.”

Modi said little about Sunday’s results, other than mentioning on Twitter that he had telephoned Nitish Kumar, the leader of the grand alliance and current chief minister of Bihar, to congratulate him. Suhasini Raj contributed reporting