NEW DELHI // Prime minister Narendra Modi’s Hindu nationalist party called for “necessary introspection” after it slumped to a heavy defeat in a key state election in Bihar on Sunday.
Bihar – one of India’s largest and poorest states – had gone to the polls in five phases between October 12 and November 5.
The election commission of India counted the votes on Sunday, and Mr Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) won 53 seats, while three allies – all small parties – won a total of five seats. The BJP had won 91 out of 243 seats in the last election in 2010.
An alliance of rival parties assembled by the incumbent chief minister Nitish Kumar, from the Janata Dal (United), or JD(U), comprehensively won the Bihar election with a total of 178 seats.
When trends released by the election commission became clear in the afternoon, Mr Modi conceded defeat and tweeted: “Had a telephone conversation with Shri @NitishKumar & congratulated him on the victory.”
“The results are a bit surprising. We will have a detailed investigation and analysis of the result,” said a BJP general secretary Ram Madhav, who thought the party would secure the majority.
The JD(U) had formed a “grand coalition” that included not only the Congress but also the Rashtriya Janata Dal (RJD), headed by Mr Kumar’s erstwhile foe Laloo Prasad Yadav.
The RJD fared best out of these three parties, winning 80 seats. The JD(U) had won 71 seats, while the Congress won 27. A leftist party and an independent won the remaining seven seats.
Mr Kumar said that the results symbolised “a victory for the people of Bihar”.
“During the election, there was an aggressive campaign, and there were efforts to do everything,” Mr Kumar added, referring to the BJP’s campaign, which was frequently perceived as negative and divisive. “Rejecting all of that, the people of Bihar have chosen us.”
The loss in Bihar spells a second successive setback for Mr Modi, who had banked on his charisma and the promise of economic development to win the parliamentary elections in May last year. The BJP also did well in state elections in Maharashtra and Jammu and Kashmir last year, but won just three out of 70 seats in the Delhi assembly in February.
“Bihar is now a very big setback, especially because the BJP lost Delhi so heavily,” said Amulya Ganguli, a New Delhi-based political analyst.
Although the BJP emphasised economic development in Bihar, it also played divisive politics. Over the past two months, it ran advertisements warning that Mr Kumar was soft on terror to win Muslim votes, and that he would favour Muslims over backward castes in setting admision quotas for educational institutions.
Roughly 15 per cent of the Bihar electorate is Muslim.
Mr Ganguli blamed the BJP’s “Hindu nationalist hotheads” for turning voters off.
“They’ve been going around killing rationalists and lynching people for eating beef,” he said, referring to incidents over the past seven months.
“And the BJP was arrogant, calling everyone else anti-national.”
Mr Kumar and JD(U )received a flood of congratulatory messages from across the political spectrum, indicating how strongly the BJP has alienated its political peers.
Rahul Gandhi, vice president of the Congress party, said the result was “a victory of unity over divisiveness. Humility over arrogance. Love over hate. A victory of the people of Bihar.”
Arvind Kejriwal, the chief minister of Delhi and leader of the Aam Aadmi Party, who had said on Thursday that it was important that the BJP lost in Bihar, congratulated Mr Kumar effusively on Twitter. Even the Shiv Sena, the BJP’s partner in the Maharashtra government, called Mr Kumar a “political hero”.
Mr Modi had also been unable to deliver the swift economic reforms he promised last May, Mr Ganguli said, which helped swing the election further away from the BJP.
After the Bihar result became clear, the BJP sought to shield Mr Modi from responsibility. Prakash Javadekar, the environment minister, dismissed any suggestion that a decline in Mr Modi’s lustre had contributed to the BJP’s loss.
“This is a state election, not a referendum on central leadership or government,” Mr Javadekar told the news channel NDTV.
foreign.desk@thenational.ae
