With major state victories, Modi is expanding his dominance in India

Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s ruling party has tightened its grip on the densely populated northern part of India, the results of the state elections showed on Sunday. In doing so, she extended her dominance in a key region ahead of a general election in which Mr Modi is seeking a third term.

The results of voting for the governments of four states, with a combined population of more than 240 million people, were another blow to the dwindling fortunes of the main opposition party, the Indian National Congress. The party, which has ruled as a republic for most of India’s history, has struggled to find its way back after Modi came to national power in 2014.

The Congress party hoped to use the state elections to build momentum for next spring’s national elections, but instead lost all three states pitting them against Mr. Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party, or BJP.

The BJP managed to re-elect its government in Madhya Pradesh by a larger margin and toppled the Congress in Chhattisgarh and Rajasthan. The only victory for Congress came against a smaller regional party in Telangana, southern India, where Mr. Modi’s Hindu nationalist policies have met resistance. The results of the elections in a smaller fifth state, Mizoram, are expected on Monday, but there the race will be between two smaller regional parties.

“If the Congress revolts against the BJP’s formidable organizational and electoral machinery, burnished by Prime Minister Modi’s charisma, it will collapse,” Arati Jerath, a New Delhi-based political analyst, said of the opposition’s performance in the North. “This is the big advantage of the BJP in 2024.”

While Indian election trends could easily fluctuate in the coming months, Jerath says the BJP’s further consolidation of its support base, where Hindu nationalist politics have taken strong root, puts the BJP in a comfortable position ahead of the elections in the spring.

Mr. Modi already has a big plan to further strengthen his support base: the inauguration in January of a huge Hindu temple in Ayodhya, in the northern state of Uttar Pradesh, to be built on the site of a destroyed mosque. Demands for the temple’s construction helped turn Hindu nationalism into a major political movement in the 1990s and made the BJP a national force.

This month’s state elections, while generally not a direct indicator of how people will vote in the general election, were important in terms of timing. For the Congress Party, it was seen as an opportunity to show that it had got its act together and regained victory.

In the months before the election, Congress had swept the BJP by capturing the southern state of Karnataka, the cash-rich center of India’s technology industry. It also formed a national alliance called INDIA, which included smaller and regional parties – an indication of its acceptance of a clear truth: that Congress alone cannot win the battle against Modi’s formidable BJP and its considerable resources.

However, in the state elections this month, the Congress decided to contest only in states where it saw a good chance of victory against the BJP.

Congress’s refusal to partner in these elections with the same parties it hopes to ally with in the national struggle against Mr. Modi will diminish its standing in the eyes of those partners, analysts said.

“It will be very difficult for them to mount a credible challenge to the BJP in 2024,” said Rahul Verma, a fellow at the Center for Policy Research in New Delhi. “Now I am not sure how the INDIA alliance will turn out.”

In the three states where the BJP and Congress went head-to-head, there was little difference between the parties, with both focusing mainly on benefits – from subsidized gas cylinders, to deposits for farmers and married women, to payments for books and school bags for students. Both parties faced voter fatigue, allegations of corruption and infighting within their ranks.

But to cover up its weakness, the BJP had what Congress has struggled to find, analysts say: ideological clarity and charismatic national leadership.

The BJP clearly stands for Hindu nationalism and its divisive vision of making India a Hindu-centered state. Mr. Modi, who portrays himself as an ambitious champion of both development and the interests of Hindus, also has strong appeal to voters across the country. His government has channeled the resources of India’s top-heavy and unequal economy into targeted social services, often doled out in his name. In states where local BJP leaders were struggling in the elections, Mr Modi’s face was on the posters; the handouts for voters were presented as “Modi’s guarantee.”

In comparison, the Congress has struggled to present a leadership that can take on Mr. Modi, or a clear vision for his secular ideology. Mr. Modi’s efforts to leverage Hindu networks over the past decade and his firm grip on the national media have significantly transformed India’s secular mainstream, especially in the country’s north.

Rahul Gandhi, the Congress leader who would likely be a candidate for prime minister if the party wins this spring, is often caricatured by Mr. Modi and his aides as an entitled man and a lightweight.

While Mr Gandhi has portrayed the Congress as a proponent of harmony and secularism against Mr Modi’s divisive Hindu-first politics, that difference has not been clearly projected by officials at the state level.

In this month’s elections, Madhya Pradesh, with a population of over 80 million people, which the BJP had ruled for most of the past two decades, was seen as a key test of whether the Congress could use the BJP’s weaknesses to to achieve success. victory.

The state’s BJP government was accused by critics of widespread corruption, political infighting and inciting communal tensions and riots with its Hindu policies.

The Congress also accused the BJP of using underhanded methods when it toppled the Congress government in 2020 that had come to power two years earlier with the help of smaller parties. The BJP managed to take power that year by getting a number of Congress delegates to switch sides.

Despite the criticism, the BJP still held on to Madhya Pradesh – winning around 50 more seats, according to Sunday’s results.

“As a political party, as an organisation, the BJP is much more agile and adaptive,” says Mr Verma, the analyst. “They are willing to take bold steps, to experiment to win at all costs.”