Self Reflection Is Not Modi's Trait!

The Bihar imbroglio has stung Modi badly. So have angry elders. Outlook offers ten ways for the PM to follow, for a regaining of old elan.

- Pranay Sharma And Bula Devi

In the political history of contem­porary India, it is not unusual for a ruling party, helmed by a popular prime minister, to face an electoral defeat in a state assembly election shortly after a Lok Sabha victory. Indira Gandhi had lost two Con­gress strongholds—Andhra Pradesh and Karnataka—in 1983 and subse­quently her son, Rajiv Gandhi, who won a humongous mandate in 1984, got a drubbing in Haryana in 1987. Even the nDA government of Atal Behari Vajpa­yee had famously lost Delhi, Rajasthan and Madhya Pradesh in 1998 over the ‘onion crisis’ within a few months of hav­ ing come to power at the Centre.

How is it, then, that the drubbing the BJP got in the recent Bihar assembly election is being seen as such a big blow to Narendra Modi?

Political analysts cite several reasons and explain why the results are being seen as a debacle for the BJP and more importantly, a major setback for the prime minister. Unlike his predecessors, both in the BJP and in the Congress, Narendra Modi had made himself the sole face of the party in all the five assembly polls it fought since the NDA came to power in Delhi in 2014. Of these, the BJP had won three states, but lost two—Delhi and Bihar. Therefore, it is natural that for both victory and defeat, Modi will be held responsible. The defeat in Delhi was stunning—it almost wiped out the BJP from the state. The beneficiary, however, was not only Arvind Kejriwal’s Aam Aadmi Party; in its own way it also helped non-BJP opposition parties—which had till then been in a deep sulk, smarting from their near wipe-out in 2014—take heart.