Polls apart

With the Karnataka win, the Congress might have found a winning formula; the BJP has to reassess its own

- SONI MISHRA AND PRATUL SHARMA

No sooner had the last vote been counted in Karnataka than talk in political circles became about the national impact of the results. A jubilant Congress, looking at the big picture, immediately inflated the central leadership’s role in what was a campaign powered largely by state leaders. “The results offer the first electoral evidence of the impact of the Bharat Jodo Yatra led by Rahul Gandhi,” said Congress leader Shaktisinh Gohil. “The Congress did remarkably well in the seven districts and 51 seats that the yatra passed through, and the BJP got just a handful of seats. We will see similar results in other states and in the Lok Sabha polls.”

The party also dubbed this a failure of Prime Minister Narendra Modi, who had campaigned extensively in the state. “He made the election a referendum on his own popularity and failed miserably,” said Pramod Tiwari, Congress deputy leader in the Rajya Sabha. “The BJP’s loss is Modi’s failure.”

The winners, however, would be wise to remember the 2018 state elections, where the BJP did not get a majority. The following year, in the Lok Sabha elections, it won 25 of the 28 seats. The BJP, in fact, draws solace from past electoral data that shows that voters differentiate between state and Lok Sabha elections. The BJP has seen this trend—bad in the state elections, great in the nationals—in Delhi, Rajasthan, Madhya Pradesh, Chhattisgarh and West Bengal.