It was an early Holi for the BJP on Saturday with the party winning a stunning three-fourths majority in both Uttar Pradesh and Uttarakhand and going from zero to 21 seats in Manipur in a result widely seen as a ringing endorsement of Prime Minister Narendra Modi and his policies.
If Uttar Pradesh and Uttarakhand delivered an unambiguous vote for the Bharatiya Janata Party, Punjab backed the Congress. In Manipur and Goa, it was down to the wire with the two parties going neck and neck.
Predicting that the party would go on to form government in Manipur and Goa too, BJP president Amit Shah called it a four on five election and said Modi was the biggest leader since Independence.
With its alliance with the Samajwadi Party (SP) being given the cold shoulder in Uttar Pradesh where its own individual score was an abysmal seven out of 103 it had contested, the Congress found solace in Punjab winning in 78 of 117 seats, leaving the incumbent Akali Dal-BJP government with just 15 seats. The results also served as a check on the Aam Aadmi Party’s national ambitions with the party getting 23 seats in Punjab and not a single seat in Goa.
As counting day wound to a close, the subtext was clear. Demonetization had won and so had the irrepressible sway of Modi as his party’s most visible campaigner in an election that comes just after the half-way mark for the Modi government and was being seen by some sections as a curtain-raiser for the 2019 parliamentary polls.
The BJP’s dramatic win in Uttar Pradesh, the country’s most populous and politically significant state, was the stuff for record books. The last party to have crossed the 300 mark was the Congress in 1980. Thirty-seven years later, the BJP bagged 312 of 403 seats in the House leaving the SP-Congress alliance far behind at 54 and the Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP) decimated with a dismal 19.
A closer reading of the trends available indicated that the BJP had won in 100 Muslim majority constituencies in the state.
As clouds of gulal coloured the air and jubilant supporters chanted “Modi, Modi” in BJP offices across the states, including the headquarters in Delhi, Law Minister Ravi Shankar Prasad added that the result marked a “tectonic shift” in Indian politics and was bigger than even the BJP’s parliamentary win in 2014.
From the Hindi heartland to the hills of Uttarakhand, it was a big win for the BJP with the party bagging 57 of the 70 seats in a state famous for its photo-finish results. In the last Assembly election in 2012, the party won 31 seats, just one less than the Congress.
It was not a decisive verdict for the BJP in Manipur but was equally significant, marking an impressive electoral debut with 21 seats, just under Congress’s 28 in the 60-member House.
In the land of sun, sand and sea, Goa, the picture was equally confusing with the BJP at 13 and Congress at 17 in the 40-member House.
The Congress went into reflective mode. “Congress party is humbled by the shining victory in Punjab and is inching towards victory in the states of Goa and Manipur,” said Congress leader Randeep Singh Surjewala. “We congratulate the BJP and PM, Sh. Narendra Modi on the victory in Uttarakhand and UP. We bow before the verdict of people of the two states. Congress never arrogates in victory and is not discouraged in defeat,” he added.
The mood was more celebratory in Punjab where Congress’s Amarinder Singh prepared to become chief minister again.
“Kejriwal is a summer storm, he came and he’s gone,” Amarinder Singh said while promising to eradicate drugs from the state within four weeks.
“It is the Congress workers who have done it. They were given the strategy and they worked hard on it,” he told reporters.
In the electoral patchwork of winners and losers in the five states that went to the polls, two chief ministers -- Uttarakhand’s Harish Rawat and Goa’s Laxmikant Parsekar -- lost their seats.
“The people of Uttarakhand have elected development. They have endorsed Prime Minister Narendra Modi as the most popular leader in the country. It is a great win of BJP party workers,” Shyam Jaju, BJP general secretary in-charge of Uttarakhand, told DNA.
“We need to think what was lacking in our approach,” his political rival, Uttarakhand Congress president Kishore Upadhyay, said.
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