New Delhi: Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi met leaders of his party on Monday to discuss whether to overhaul policies and priorities in the wake of a humiliating defeat in elections in the eastern state of Bihar.
Modi and a dozen senior colleagues of his Hindu nationalist party, including its president Amit Shah, Finance Minister Arun Jaitley and Home Minister Rajnath Singh, gathered at the party’s offices to analyse the reasons for the defeat.
“There are lessons to be learnt,” Jaitley told reporters after the meeting, without outlining specifics. “In elections you win some and lose some.” Sunday’s loss in Bihar, India’s third most populous and poorest state, is the most significant setback for Modi since he won a crushing victory in a general election last year.
For the first time since he came to power, party leaders are openly starting to question the direction of the government.
The Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) office in New Delhi was virtually deserted on Monday, with only a few workers compiling newspaper clippings on the election defeat.
The Bihar loss may hamper Modi’s reform agenda because he needs to win most state elections in the next three years to gain full control of parliament. India’s states are represented in the upper house, where the BJP lacks a majority.
The government announced on Monday that parliament will resume for the winter session on November 26. Over the last year, Modi has struggled to pass laws, including tax and labour reforms, and now faces an opposition with political momentum.
Some BJP lawmakers called for the party to promote a more unifying agenda focusing on economic development, after a campaign in Bihar that sought to polarise voters along caste and religious lines.
“We have to be single mindedly focused on development, development, development,” said Chandan Mitra, a BJP member of parliament. “We can’t afford to be distracted by anything else.” A senior BJP leader, who asked not to be named, said the problem was that Modi sidelined too many people.
“Modi thinks he can do it all at once. He wants economic growth, social and cultural revolution, to win political battles and project himself as a statesman,” he said.
“If he wins then every voice of dissent can be silenced, but if he fails then every voice of dissent is going to build.”
Arun Shourie, a minister in the last BJP government, called for a change in course.
“We should be grateful to the people of Bihar because the direction has been halted,” he told NDTV news. Asked what went wrong with the party’s Bihar campaign, he said: “Everything”.
The setback destroys any hopes Modi might have had of securing control of parliament’s upper house in this five-year term, barely 18 months after he won India’s strongest national mandate in three decades.
“It’s going to make his life really difficult — he will struggle to form a majority in the upper house,” said Shilan Shah, an economist at Capital Economics. “The next step is to put aside some of the really polarising issues and form alliances.” At a meeting after Sunday’s Bihar results, in which Chief Minister Nitish Kumar’s “grand alliance” won 178 seats to 58 for the BJP and its allies, close aides urged Modi to reach out to opposition heavyweights he has until now shunned.
“There is a realisation that he will have to negotiate,” one senior adviser said, requesting anonymity due to the sensitivity of the matter.
It remains to be seen whether Modi follows his aides’ advice. Since storming to power, he has made a point of trying to crush the ousted Congress party and the Nehru-Gandhi dynasty that leads it.
He has not met party president Sonia Gandhi, even though Congress successfully blocked legislation during the last parliamentary session and frustrated several of Modi’s key reforms. This is now likely to change, the adviser noted.
Signature policies, above all the biggest tax reform since independence in 1947, are at stake.
If Modi is to make headway, aides say he will have to wean himself off the company of friends from his home state of Gujarat, which he ran for over a decade, and the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), the Hindu movement that is the BJP’s ideological parent and moulded him as a politician.
“If they don’t manage to get that consensus, we won’t have sustained and stable reforms,” said M.R. Madhavan, president of PRS Legislative Research and a leading observer of parliamentary politics.
Also under critical scrutiny is the polarising campaign strategy of BJP president Amit Shah, who irked many by saying firecrackers would go off in Pakistan if the BJP lost in Bihar.
The jibe appeared to be intended to mobilise the party’s core Hindu support base against Muslim-majority Pakistan, India’s arch rival.
It was Shah, an old friend from Gujarat, who scripted the BJP’s Bihar strategy exclusively around Modi: the party did not put up a candidate for the post of chief minister.
“We should have projected a local face as our chief ministerial candidate,” one regional BJP leader told Reuters, adding that the party should have done a better job of pitching its message of development and steered clear of controversy.
Criticism has rained down on Modi and Shah for trying to turn Bihar into a referendum on the prime minister’s leadership, leaving him vulnerable to a strong campaign by Kumar and ally Lalu Prasad that addressed voter concerns in a state riven by complex divisions of caste and religion.
“The BJP will hopefully learn the lesson that communal politics does not yield returns in the long run. But it is not going to be easy,” political analyst Pratap Bhanu Mehta wrote in the Indian Express.
Two days before his party crashed to defeat, Modi hosted RSS leader Mohan Bhagwat for lunch at his residence.
One source familiar with their table talk said Bhagwat asked whether Modi wanted to carry on as a campaigning prime minister or instead focus single mindedly on running the country.
As Modi prepares to visit Britain, where he is due on Friday to address a sell-out crowd at London’s Wembley Stadium, the gulf that has opened between expectation and achievement has widened.
