BJP landslide in Uttar Pradesh a boost for India prime minister Narendra Modi
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Version 0 of 1. India’s ruling Bharatiya Janata party (BJP) has won control of the country’s most populous and influential state by an unexpectedly large margin, cementing Narendra Modi’s dominance of Indian politics and putting the prime minister on track for re-election in 2019. Final results released by the Indian election commission on Saturday showed the BJP had won 311 of 403 seats in Uttar Pradesh, enough to form a rare majority government in the north Indian state of 220 million people. Its chief rival, a coalition between the Congress and the incumbent Samajwadi party, had won just 54 seats and was leading in one more. As the scale of the victory became clear, Modi tweeted that he was overjoyed his party had “received unprecedented support from all sections of society”. Every moment of our time, everything we do is for welfare & wellbeing of the people of India. We believe in the power of 125 crore Indians. Thank you. Long live democracy! https://t.co/hJoGsO5lGA His party’s president, Amit Shah, said the win was the biggest in Uttar Pradesh in the country’s modern history, coming off the 47 seats the party had won at the last state poll in 2012. “People have given us historic mandate and raised the party’s responsibilities,” he told a party conference. Party workers and supporters chanted the prime minister’s name in raucous celebrations outside BJP headquarters in Delhi and the state capital Lucknow – which many said would continue throughout the spring festival of Holi, which starts this weekend. Rajnath Singh, the Indian home minister who may be parachuted into the state parliament to lead the new government, said the victory had “changed [the] political picture of the country”. The decisive win was interpreted as a broad endorsement of Modi’s decision last November to invalidate 86% of all currency in circulation as part of an anti-corruption drive. The execution of demonetisation was botched, with cash shortages persisting in parts of the country, but Modi successfully framed the policy as a decisive strike against the untaxed hoards of “black money” accumulated by the country’s wealthy elites. That strategy appears to have paid off, helping to broaden the BJP’s appeal beyond its traditionally base of upper-caste Hindus and merchants, and sustaining the extraordinary personal popularity Modi continues to enjoy among the Indian public nearly three years since his election. Saturday’s result also raised questions over the viability of one of Modi’s few national rivals, Rahul Gandhi, the scion of a family that has ruled India intermittently for nearly 70 years and whose patriarch, Jawaharlal Nehru, guided the country to independence in 1947. “In the opposition, there is no one else with Modi’s personality, character and credibility,” said Prabhakar Kumar, the head of CMS Media Labs, a research group that analyses media and political trends. “There are no dents to his image, no corruption. Whether or not people agree with his way or working or his policies, there is a perception that this person works 24 hours a day and has boundless energy.” Such a decisive victory in the Hindi-speaking heartland confirms the BJP as India’s premier political force, with around 80% of the country now residing in states governed by the party, Kumar added. The BJP, whose manifesto explictly casts India as a Hindu nation, in contrast to the archly secular principles on which the country was founded, appeared also to have swept heavily Muslim areas. Among them was Muzaffarnagar, where more than 60 people were killed in Hindu-Muslim riots in 2013. These wins came in spite of the party not running a single Muslim candidate in the state and some party members making “Hindutva” appeals, trying to stoke a pan-Hindu identity among a faith group traditionally riven by caste distinctions. Modi himself drew flack in February for telling an election rally that “if electricity is given uninterrupted in [the Muslim feast of] Ramzan, then it should be given in [the Hindu festival] Diwali” – implying the Samajwadi party had been favouring Muslim communities over Hindus. Kumar said religious polarisation “definitely added value” for the BJP, but noted that all parties in the diverse state had sought to carve up the electorate along caste and religious lines. “Every single party, the whole discourse of the mainstream media, was about caste and religion,” he said. “There was hardly any serious discussion on the basis of development. The main focus was polarisation and all parties contributed to that.” Akhilesh Yadav, the state’s chief minister, accepted his party’s defeat on Saturday and wished the new government well. Gandhi used Twitter to also congratulate Modi and the BJP. Four other states announced election results on Saturday – the BJP winning comfortably in Uttarakhand, and battling Congress in close polls in Manipur and Goa. Congress decisively won the Punjab contest. The Aam Aadmi party, born out of an anti-corruption activist movement in 2013 and which controls the capital, Delhi, suffered a setback to its hopes of establishing itself as the third force in Indian national politics. The party struggled to win any seats in Goa and, late on Saturday, falling well short of Congress’s total in Punjab. |