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Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi suffered a significant political setback on Sunday when his party Bharatiya Janata failed to seize power in the state of West Bengal after an aggressive election campaign blamed for helping provoking the fierce second wave of Covid-19 cases in the country.
The setback follows the growing public anger of the Modi government manipulation of the pandemic, a day when India recorded nearly 400,000 new infections for the second day in a row.
“It’s a slap in the face to the BJP,” said Gilles Verniers, a political scientist at Ashoka University. “The message is that the Modi brand alone is likely to fade and is insufficient to make up for the lack of organization and governance“.
Modi went to about 20 mass political rallies to try to help his BJP oust the ruling party of the West Bengal-led Trinamool Congress party. Mamata Banerjee, who has twice served in the national cabinet and is now the only woman minister in chief of the states of India.
Modi’s right-hand man, Interior Minister Amit Shah, went to more than 50 rallies and worked tirelessly on the campaign.
Public health experts warned that huge plenary meetings would turn into superextension events, providing fertile ground for the coronavirus.
But Modi paid little attention, holding the size of the meetings despite rising national infection rates. During the campaign, West Bengal’s daily figures for new cases rose from about 250 a day in mid-March to almost 17,000 a day today.
Beyond the state, health experts say television coverage of Modi rallies is likely to have indicated to millions of Indians that the danger of Covid-19 had passed and that they could return to pre- pandemics.
Critics argue that Modi and Shah’s concern about the protracted campaign distracted them from responding to the deep coronavirus crisis, with Indians struggling to find hospital beds and as the oxygen supplies ran out.
Modi finally convened public rallies in West Bengal on April 22, a day when the new case load confirmed by India reached 350,000. But Vernier said the willingness to heed public health warnings had exposed “the BJP’s mindset of gaining power at all costs.”
“The BJP has treated elections as an end in themselves: gaining power to gain power, not as a means to govern,” he said. “It was not a regional election outsourced to a local branch. They treated it like a national election. Modi made the contest personal. ”
Trinamool Congress party leader Mamata Banerjee signals victory when addressing supporters and media after victory in West Bengal polls © AP
Sunday’s results in West Bengal, which showed that TMC would win about 213 of the 292 seats in the state legislature, are likely to raise Banerjee’s profile as a potential unifying figure to rally India’s fragmented political opposition, though that no general election should be held. until 2024.
Banerjee, known as a shrewd political street fighter with a taste for white cotton saris and flip-flops, wrote in March to 15 regional opposition leaders urging them to unite to defeat the BJP, accusing him of to assault democracy.
“It’s a possible opposition aggregator,” Verniers said.
Sunday’s elections to four state legislatures did not mean a total ousting for the BJP, which retained power in the state of Assam, in tea cultivation, defeating a fragmented opposition.
But in the states of Kerala and Tamil Nadu, BJP-related regional parties were defeated by local rivals. In Kerala, a communist-led coalition was re-elected, which has been praised for its treatment of the coronavirus pandemic.
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