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SURELY this could not have been the birthday gift that Prime Minister Narendra Modi was looking forward to. Back in his home state for the first time since leading the BJP/NDA to an unprecedented victory in the 2014 parliamentary elections, his party’s performance in the just concluded byelections is likely to have left an unpleasant taste. Not only did the Congress wrest back three seats out of the nine which went to the polls in his home state, it won three out of the four in Rajasthan, earlier held by the BJP.

Worse, the Samajwadi Party, written off by many, won eight out of the eleven constituencies in Uttar Pradesh, including one in the prime minister’s own parliamentary constituency of Varanasi. And while the BJP spin masters may wax eloquent about the party’s maiden entry into the West Bengal assembly, they could not have been pleased about losing 20 of the 33 assembly seats, 24 of which the BJP had previously held. Coming so soon after reversals in Uttarakhand (the Congress winning all three) and Bihar (the Janata Dal-U winning six out of ten), clearly the BJP strategists need to go back to the drawing board to decipher their loss of support.

Even as one awaits more detailed and disaggre-gated data, some preliminary hypothesis do suggest themselves. The most dramatic results have come from Uttar Pradesh, a state which the BJP had swept in the parliamentary elections. Yet, despite a singularly unimpressive performance of the state government under the leadership of Akhilesh Yadav, the Samajwadi Party has bounced back with surprising vigour. While some credit this victory to the absence of the Bahujan Samaj Party from the fray, it is likely that the electorate reacted negatively to the aggressive ‘Hindutva’ in the BJP campaign. In a state still to recover from the horrific riots in western U.P. just prior to the parliamentary elections, the crass and inflammatory speeches of important BJP leaders like Mahant Avaidyanath, Sakshi Maharaj and Maneka Gandhi – be they about ‘love jihad’, madrassas as schools for Islamist radicals, or the link between ‘illegal meat trade’ and financing of terror – only added to the unease.

Stoking communal tension and polarizing the electorate on the eve of elections has long been a tried and tested strategy, unfortunately of all parties. It seemingly worked in the 2014 parliamentary elections, in part because both the BJP and the SP sought to consolidate their respective vote banks. This time, however, the SP refused to cooperate and kept its more vocal pro-Muslim leaders like Azam Khan in the background. This may well have helped the moderate and sane mainstream elements across communities, uneasy with the BJP’s aggressive rhetoric, to line up behind the SP as the only available counter to hate politics, particularly since the Congress can no longer be relied upon, and the BSP continues to sulk. If this is true, the BJP strategists need to rein in their hotheads, preferably publicly chastise them, and return to a focus on growth and employment if the party is not to lose support.

These results have also exposed the weakness of local units of the party. In substantial measure, the parliamentary elections were driven by a Modi-centric campaign, contrasting his decisiveness, organizational virtues and administrative skills vis-a-vis a weak and discredited UPA. The strategy paid rich dividends. But now with Modi choosing to remain in the background, these being byelections, ‘normal’ politics held sway and the BJP displayed all the infirmities that it accused the Congress of – divided leadership, factionalism, backbiting, driven by personal agendas and so on. With the BJP appearing no different from its rivals – both in states where it rules and where it is in opposition – the electorate chose the way it does in normal elections.

Finally, it also appears that the BJP became a victim of complacency. Still basking in the glow of its earlier victory, it forgot that its opponents not only learnt from their defeat, but also displayed a fighting resolve that was missing earlier. The manner in which a young Sachin Pilot, who was drubbed in the parliamentary elections, is trying to rebuild the Congress in Rajasthan, is clear signal that political fortunes, no matter how tattered, can be resurrected provided one is willing to work hard.

What lessons the BJP will draw from this round of contests is at the moment unclear. But with major assembly elections due later this year in Maharashtra and Haryana, and possibly Delhi and J&K, the party cannot afford to put off a much needed atma chintan, about both its persona and policies. Even those hostile to the BJP’s larger cultural/ideological project do not wish for the party to fall back into its earlier routine of promoting aggressive cultural nationalism. That would be a sure route to discord and disaster. The current feeling of hope, fragile as it may be about achche din, should not be permitted to dissipate.

Harsh Sethi