Two high-profile elections on Tuesday continued their surprise twists as Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s polling power was tested for the first time since his party lost a shocking majority in India’s national elections this summer. Ta.
In the northern state of Haryana, Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party did surprisingly well. The opposition National Congress party was so popular there that local leaders were already sparring over the spoils. Instead, the Bharatiya Janata Party maintained its influence in the state and warned that exit polls were unreliable.
But in the disputed region of Jammu and Kashmir, Mr. Modi’s intense maneuvering to assert the supremacy of the Bharatiya Janata Party failed, with the Congress and its allies winning a resounding victory.
Indian states are important in their own right. The largest states have populations comparable to Brazil and Japan, and their leaders wield enormous power. But for those who want to use the results as tea leaves for reading the political future of the country as a whole, the strongest sign is that India believes that local issues matter most and that building a coalition government is All that was said was that we seemed to be returning to the pre-Modi norm of being difficult.
Until recently, Mr. Modi seemed to be working a different kind of magic at the polling booths. His personal image and evocation of India as a global Hindu power seemed to be enough to sway even urgent local contests.
Then, Indian voters denounced him in this summer’s parliamentary elections, leaving pollsters baffled. The BJP lost its majority in Parliament. The party remained the single largest party and was able to build a coalition to keep Modi in power, making him the first Indian since its founding leader Jawaharlal Nehru to win three consecutive terms. He became prime minister. But his air of invincibility was shattered.
Ever since the national results were announced on June 4, there has been silence as everyone waited to see how the broken pieces would fall. On the surface, Mr. Modi has continued to work as if nothing has changed, but he has refrained from talking about the sweeping reforms to India’s institutions that were expected before the vote.
Rahul Verma, a political scientist at the New Delhi Center for Policy Research, said the Bharatiya Janata Party’s victory in Haryana was “a classic example of an organization learning from its mistakes” — the kind of thing that could make or break a party’s campaign. He said it was because of his tactics. It won many seats by a narrow margin. The vote share was diluted by the emergence of clearly independent candidates from the Jat caste on which the Congress depended.
The case of Jammu and Kashmir is particularly complex and cannot be extrapolated to national dynamics. India’s only Muslim-majority state was sliced in half and downgraded to a union territory in 2019 after Mr. Modi won a national election.
By redrawing electoral districts to give more weight to Hindu-majority regions, the Modi government is seeking to hold its own elections in the remaining parts of the unstable and disputed state of Jammu and Kashmir, which have not voted for its own leaders. I wanted to build rights. within 10 years.
The Bharatiya Janata Party’s disappointment here was significant, if not surprising. that Kashmiris would rather vote for anyone, even a local party aligned with mainstream Indian politicians, than the Hindu-first leader who stripped them of their special status in 2019; was obvious.
Hilal Ahmad, a shopkeeper in the former state capital Srinagar, said he was “disappointed that the Indian people do not understand” that the Bharatiya Janata Party has failed to bring the normalization and development it promised. said. The vote gave him another way to say that.
“One thing is very clear,” Verma said. “Indian elections and Indian voters cannot be taken for granted.”
With the raucous carnival of Indian democracy back in full force, small battles may take on larger dimensions.
For example, Vinesh Phogat, the Olympic champion wrestler who accused a Bharatiya Janata Party politician of sexual harassment, is set to win a seat in the Haryana assembly. On Tuesday, Ms Phogat simply declared: “Truth has won.” Although her ideas have received widespread attention, they have nothing to do with pre-Modi or post-Modi politics.
