Winning and losing is part of the game, he said, pointing to the fact that after the Lok Sabha success the BJP had won four assembly elections and a string of local body polls in several states under him. Former chief minister Lalu Prasad Yadav’s Rashtriya Janata Dal (RJD) and the Congress Party were the two important members of the alliance. While the ruling NDA managed to get 58 seats (BJP 53) in the 243-member Bihar assembly, JD(U)-RJD-Congress Mahagathbandhan secured 178 seats. Thus Muslims en masse defected from the party and voted for the opposing candidates. Party president Shah rooted himself to Bihar for over eight months to devise strategies. He won from Imamganj in Gaya, his home district.
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The alliance is led by chief minister Nitish Kumar, who has already served two terms as head of Bihar’s state government.
“If he wins then every voice of dissent can be silenced, but if he fails then every voice of dissent is going to build”.
Bihari voters rejected this brand of politics, however, choosing instead the combination of social inclusion and Kumar-led development that the grand alliance seemed to represent.
The defeat suffered by Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi in the elections held in Bihar, the third-most populous state in the country, is being read as a waning of his power – which may be a premature assessment. Mr. Kejriwal said “The way the prime minister was working with arrogance and pride, and the manner in which the Modi-Amit Shah duo was functioning dictatorially, this poll result has broken the Centre’s arrogance”.
According to Fitch Ratings, even a big win for BJP in Bihar would not have translated into to sufficient support for the party in the Rajya Sabha anytime soon.
In the first challenge to Modi since he emerged the undisputed leader of the party and the government in May a year ago, the veterans including Shanta Kumar and Yashwant Sinha issued a brief but strongly-worded statement that demanded a thorough review of the debacle. No other BJP leaders were as visible through the election as Modi. “Instead, the issues of cow and Pakistan were raised”, he said. “All this resulted in our defeat”, he said. I don’t want to go into what went wrong with the BJP as there are poll managers of the party to analyze it.
Global media presented the Bihar results as a referendum on Prime Minister and a setback to his government’s reforms. Party leaders and workers consumed and distributed candies, burst firecrackers, smeared “holi” colour on one another and danced to drums.
“We failed to estimate the popularity surge of the (rival) alliance…so the size of that coalition arithmetically became more than us”, Mr Jaitley told a press conference after the party’s assessment.
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Earlier this week, Finance Minister Arun Jaitley slammed India’s protesting intellectuals and said there was no intolerance in the country for them to fight.
