In the first test of Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s poll power since his party’s shocking loss of its majority in India’s national elections this summer, two closely watched elections on Tuesday kept the surprises coming.
In the northern state of Haryana, the results for Mr. Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party were surprisingly good: The opposition Congress Party was so heavily favored there that its local leaders were already sparring over the spoils. Instead, the B.J.P. kept its hold on the state and served a warning that exit polls are nothing to bank on.
In the contested territory of Jammu and Kashmir, though, Mr. Modi’s heavy maneuvering to assert B.J.P. ascendance was foiled, and Congress and its allies won overwhelmingly.
India’s states matter in their own right — the biggest have populations to match Brazil’s or Japan’s, and their leaders wield enormous power. But for those hoping to use the results as tea leaves to read the whole country’s political future, the strongest indication was only that India appeared to be reverting to more of its pre-Modi norm, where local issues matter most and coalition building gets tricky.
Until recently, Mr. Modi seemed to work a different kind of magic at the ballot box. His personal image and his evocation of India as a global Hindu power seemed enough to sway even urgent local contests.
Then Indian voters stung him in national parliamentary elections this summer — and flummoxed the pollsters, too. The B.J.P. lost its majority in Parliament. It held on as the single largest party, able to build a coalition and keep Mr. Modi in power, making him the first Indian prime minister to win three consecutive terms since Jawaharlal Nehru, the nation’s first leader. But his air of invincibility was shattered.
Since those national results were announced on June 4, there has been a hush, as everyone waited to see how the broken pieces would fall. Mr. Modi has carried on as if nothing has changed, superficially, but he has refrained from talking about dramatically remaking Indian institutions, as he had been expected to do so before the vote.
Rahul Verma, a political scientist with the Center for Policy Research in New Delhi, attributed the B.J.P.’s victory in Haryana to the “classic case of an organization’s learning from its mistakes,” the kind of tactics that used to make or break the party’s campaigns. They won many seats by very narrow margins. Apparently independent candidates from the Jat caste, which Congress was depending on, sprang up and diluted its share of the votes.
The case of Jammu and Kashmir is especially complex and cannot be translated into any national trends. What had been India’s only Muslim-majority state was chopped in two and downgraded to the status of a federal territory in 2019, after Mr. Modi won in national elections.
Having reorganized its constituencies and increased the weighting of its Hindu-dominated areas, Mr. Modi’s government had hoped to build an electoral mandate for itself in what is left of Jammu and Kashmir, a volatile and disputed region that had not voted for its own leaders in 10 years.
The B.J.P.’s disappointment there was significant, if not surprising. It seemed clear that Kashmiris would rather vote for anyone, even a local party in alliance with mainstream Indian politicians, than the Hindu-first leaders who revoked their special status in 2019.
Hilal Ahmad, a shopkeeper in Srinagar, the former state capital, said he found it “disheartening that the Indian public doesn’t understand” that the B.J.P. had failed to bring the normalcy and development it had promised. Voting gave him another way to say so.
“One thing is very clear,” Mr. Verma offered. “You cannot take Indian elections and Indian voters for granted.”
With the raucous carnival of Indian democracy fully returned, small battles can take on bigger dimensions.
Vinesh Phogat, for example, an Olympic champion wrestler who accused a B.J.P. politician of sexual harassment, will take a seat in Haryana’s parliament. On Tuesday, Ms. Phogat declared simply that “truth has won.” Her cause, though it draws attention far and wide, has nothing to do with pre- or post-Modi politics.
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