A landslide. A rout. A wave. The biggest mandate the party has ever received on the back of DeMo, misread by all as it worked for, rather than against NaMo. For anyone who doubted the depth of support that powered Narendra Damodardas Modi to the prime minister's seat in 2014, the 325 seats that the BJP won in Uttar Pradesh alone which has brought it back to power in India's most populous state after 14 years with a thumping, concomitant surge in the vote share by 25%, tells its own story.
The Congress vote share - with an abysmal seven seat haul - has dropped from 63 per cent to six in U.P. over the same period! The Samajwadis and the Bahujan Samaj with their limited casteist backing, stand vastly diminished. It may not be the complete Congress-Mukt Bharat that Modi and his comrade in arms Amit Shah envisaged after this five state poll, although the 324 seat haul in UP alone, which gives it control of over roughly half the 80 seats when parliamentary polls come round in 2019, will be a huge boost to the kitty. But it comes close. Very, very close, fulfilling the truism that whoever wins U.P., wins all of Bharat!
In the here and now, Goa is yet to be called with Manohar Parrikar, this close to cobbling together enough support in a post-poll arrangement. (As could the Congress). Uttarakhand and Manipur, likely, are in saffron mode, with the grounding of Udta Akali Punjab a given. BJP strategists are banking on the fact that the flamboyance and elitist excesses that derailed Amarinder Singh ten years ago will once again work in the BJP's favour in 2019.
Modi also wants assembly polls in well adminstered BJP states Rajasthan, Madhya Pradesh and even Gujarat to be held alongside the general elections so that he can deliver the north. As he now plans to deliver the south. That's Modi 2.0.
In the BJP's first outpost in Karnataka, which slipped out of its grasp after its stalwart B.S. Yeddyurappa mishandled his first stint in power, the former chief minister is working overtime to identify the Congress' - and the BJP's - weakest points - and moving as swiftly to plug it. Today, the saffron tent is crowded with Congressmen who persist in seeing Chief Minister Siddaramaiah as an outsider, a non-Congressmen foisted on them, and blindly, playing into the BJP's hands as it executes its plans of eating into the Congress' Vokkaliga vote in the Old Mysore region while keeping its own Lingayat vote share intact. A fractured Vokkaliga vote together with the minorities and BC-OBC-BT vote, even with Siddaramaiah's Kuruba community'sbacking, will clearly not be enough to sustain the Congress.
In Andhra, the BJP has a resource hungry ally in Chandrababu Naidu, who, in his rush to build a new state could be turning a blind eye to the political space he may have to cede for developmental funds that insiders say, the centre is being extremely niggardly with. A pact with the devil?
Similarly in Tamil Nadu, the AIADMK government of Edapalli Palanisami must contend with staying in power without the glue of Jayalalitha's fanatical female following which saw the party buck anti-incumbency and return to power in October 2016. One false step and they will fall foul of the BJP-appointed Governor, tasked to ensure that in a Rajya Sabha, reinforced with the numbers that accrued from this victory in UP, the AIADMK MPs toe the line.
That leaves Kerala - ripe for picking, and the possible imposition of Presidents Rule and early elections if the killing fields of Kannur turn red with the blood of RSS workers whom the BJP insist are being brutally scythed to death by the Marxists.
Kerala Chief Minister Pinarayi Vijayan has been the target of a calculated tarring, accused of encouraging the tit-for-tat killings that have been a staple of Kerala politics whenever the Communist Party comes to power. It may have begun in 1968 with the brutal killing of the RSS leader Vadikkal Ramakrishnan in Thalassery, and continues to shock today, with the violent end of another RSS activist as recently as January this year - one of the 186 killed in and around Kannur in the last 40 years and more.
The BJP's Kummanan Rajasekharan is keeping score. One more killing in Pinarayi, where Vijayan hails from, and the little known village could provide the spark for a righteous upsurge by a newly defiant BJP that will stop at nothing to plant the saffron flag in the south.
