Prime Minister Narendra Modi and the BJP have been put on notice yet again. Having failed to establish a clear majority for the BJP-led NDA alliance in the last parliament polls, a more shocking and shameful series of reverses awaited them when the results of the 13 assembly seats across seven major states — five of them in the deep North – were declared on Saturday. The BJP could win only two seats – one each in Madhya Pradesh and Himachal Pradesh – while the INDIA alliance recoiled again from its worse days and won 10 seats; and an Independent one seat. Clearly, the BJP that had boasted of being unassailable has taken a huge hit, and its reverberations will linger on the political horizon for long. If the parliament polls showed Modi’s hold on the people was weakening even in the main battleground state of Uttar Pradesh, including in the religious powerhouses of Varanasi and Ayodhya, the assembly by-poll results, in one go, showed a deepening sense of discontentment against the BJP too. Starkly, even Badrinath too turned its face against the religious bluff of the BJP. The party manages to retain its high profile only in Madhya Pradesh thanks to the solid ground built for the party by Shivraj Singh Chouhan while as CM. Apart from the Congress wins, the TMC won seats in West Bengal and the AAP in Punjab’s Jalandhar.
Modi, it appears, had begun demonstrating the arrogance of power in increasing levels starting with the arrest and jailing of Rahul Gandhi in a defamation case in Gujarat, where “manipulation of justice” was suspected. In a series of abrasive acts, the central government and its investigating agencies targeted Modi’s – or BJP’s—opponents one after another, and lately Delhi chief minister Arvind Kejriwal and Jharkhand’s Hemant Soren. Both the CMs were arrested in corruption cases after investigations of a tutored kind. Yet, notably, a ‘tainted’ Chandrababu Naidu, who was arrested by the AP government in a corruption case, won the recent polls with BJP backing. He is now CM again and the main lieutenant for a weakened Modi’s government. Most of the worst kingpins of corruption are left untouched. The LS and the by-poll results put paid to BJP’s and Modi’s ambition and arrogance of seeing a “Congress-Mukht” Bharat, even as the Congress’ history is eminently intertwined with the history of the nation. Modi’s lip-service to the poor and backward segments of the society, to tiring levels by now, was never matched with action on the ground. Modi has proven he has no panacea to address the major ills that plague the society, like corruption and social disparities. From being an ‘emperor,’ a chastened Modi’s fall was to the level of a ‘consensus-builder’. It could soon be worse, if the present results are any indication.
