Tuesday, 16 September 2014

Modi’s wave is waning



I am surprising myself by posting something on my blog on politics. But then I thought, why not? Writing on politics is what I do for a living (even if it means biting back my true feelings).

So I decided to write what I would have liked to post with my company. A heavily censored version of it went online, but here is the original piece that I wrote. Yes, it still is rather dry, and re-reading it, it does sound cautiously (read barely) critical, but hey, it’s a start!



With the counting for the by-poll results in 33 constituencies across 10 states taking place on Tuesday, a trend emerged where the Prime Minister Narendra Modi-led wave for the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), that was so successful in the 2014 Lok Sabha elections, failed to live to its hype.


The biggest change came in Uttar Pradesh, where the Samajwadi Party (SP) made huge inroads into a state that had been hit by riots last year. Despite aggressive campaigning by the BJP, especially its Gorakhpur MP Yogi Adityanath, the BJP could only bag two of the nine seats in UP.


The BJP did not do well in Rajasthan either, with the Congress bagging three of the four seats which went to the polls. While Congress leader Sachin Pilot termed his party’s performance as ‘spectacular’, BJP winning the lone South Kota seat would not have gone down well with Prime Minister Modi, who has repeatedly called for a ‘Congress-free’ India.




One result that has slipped under the carpet is the result in Gujarat, where BJP did win in seven out of nine seats, but significantly, the Congress managed to win two seats.


 
The BJP’s biggest gain came in West Bengal, where the party made inroads into the state for the first time in the legislative assembly, winning the Basirhat Dakshin seat. Apart from that, in Assam, three parties won one seat each – the All India United Democratic Front (AIUDF), the BJP and the Congress while in Andhra Pradesh, which too had only one seat going to polls, the Telugu Desam Party (TDP) won from Nandigama.






Overall, the by-polls results can only be seen as a disappointment. The BJP is yet to buckle the trend on not doing well in the by-polls after the dissatisfying results in the by-polls held in July in Uttarakhand and August in Bihar.

 

--- Kartikeya

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