India election: Modi’s ruling party suffers big defeat in key bellwether state polls

‘He refused to listen to the heartbeat of the country. A certain amount of arrogance came in,’ says opposition leader Rahul Gandhi

Indian Congress party supporters hold their party flag as they celebrate in Ahmedabad (AFP/Getty)

The ruling party of India’s prime minister Narendra Modi has suffered a major setback just a few months before a general election, trailing the rival Congress Party in three key state polls.

In the last set of state elections before the whole country goes to the ballot box in spring, preliminary results showed bad defeats for Mr Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) in Rajasthan and Chhattisgarh, and the vote hanging in the balance in Madhya Pradesh.

All three are big, populous states that handed dozens of seats to the BJP as Mr Modi swept to victory in the last general election in 2014.

As much as the results were a blow to the ruling party, they will provide a big boost to the image of both Congress and its leader Rahul Gandhi, who has come under particularly vicious attack from supporters of the present government.

As counting continued, Mr Gandhi addressed the media to claim victory in all three of the big states. “The election results are out, and I congratulate Congress workers and the people. It’s the people’s win, the youth’s win,” he said.

Mr Gandhi said the BJP had lost the vote in the mostly rural states because he “refused to listen” to what farmers and young people living outside cities had to say.

Hundreds of thousands of people have joined farmers’ protests in the capital Delhi in recent months, demanding the government put in place higher minimum pricing for their goods. At the same time, Mr Modi has been accused of failing to meet his promise of providing a jobs boon in rural economies.

“He refused to listen to the heartbeat of the country. A certain amount of arrogance came in,” Mr Gandhi said.

It was not all good news for Congress. Two smaller states also returned election results on Tuesday – one, Mizoram, was the only Congress-controlled state in the northeast. Both states saw Congress’s vote decimated by double-digit numbers of seats in favour of local parties.

The results highlight how Congress still needs to muster a strong, diverse alliance of parties if they are to have any hope of challenging the might of the BJP next year.

“To say these results indicate the BJP will lose in 2019 would be jumping the gun,” said Ajay Mehra, a retired political scientist at Delhi University. “But there is clearly a growing desperation that things are not going the way Mr Modi and the BJP would expect.

“The Modi magic is on the wane. People are no longer being taken in by this image of him as the ultimate leader.”

Analysts had been expecting some anti-incumbency sentiments to manifest themselves in the three big states up for grabs on Tuesday, with the BJP trying for a record fourth term in a row in both Chhattisgarh and Madhya Pradesh.

Nonetheless, they are still seen as the sort of heartlands Mr Modi will need to hold onto if he is to win again next year. His party won 62 of the 65 parliamentary seats available in these three states in 2014.

“We’ve all voted for Congress this time and our candidate is winning here,” said Bishnu Prasad Jalodia, a wheat farmer in Madhya Pradesh, where the Congress was ahead of the BJP and only slightly short of the majority needed to rule.

“BJP ignored us farmers, they ignored those of us at the bottom of the pyramid,” he said.

The BJP sought to downplay the results, saying state votes would not necessarily dictate what happens in next year’s general election.

But a spokesperson for Shiv Sena, a far-right Hindu nationalist party, said: “This is a clear message and it is the time for us to introspect.”

Sanjay Kakade, an MP for the BJP, said the party had lost its way in giving too much focus to issues that mattered to the likes of Shiv Sena, such as the creation of a Hindu temple at a site disputed by Muslims.

“I knew we would lose in Rajasthan and Chhattisgarh but Madhya Pradesh trends have come as a surprise,” he told Asian News International. “We forgot the issue of development that Modi took up in 2014.”

The BJP still has some time to get back on track before the general election, and Mr Modi retains a great deal of personal popularity.

The party has also developed a massive grassroots network of party activists, whose first task will be to row back against what now appears to be the damaging view that they are weak on jobs and farmers’ rights.

“For the BJP a lot depends on whether they can bridge the perceptional gap,” Mr Mehra said. “They have the organisational structure to do that, but the road ahead looks a lot more difficult now than it did yesterday.”