India’s ruling Bharatiya Janata Party is set to lose control of a key southern state to rival Congress in a closely watched election, dealing a rare blow to Prime Minister Narendra Modi a year before a national election. political setback.
Preliminary results released by the Election Commission of India on Saturday afternoon showed Congress winning or leading 136 of the 224 seats up for grabs in the Karnataka state assembly.
The BJP has won or won 64 seats, suggesting Congress will be able to form a government without a coalition partner.
Karnataka is one of the wealthiest states in India and home to the Bengaluru tech hub. Failure means the BJP will lose the only state it rules in the south of the country.
Modi campaigned himself for a week before Wednesday’s vote, which both the BJP and Congress have described as strategically important. Both candidates raised issues of religion, caste, the economy and corruption.
In a speech acknowledging defeat, Karnataka BJP Chief Minister Basavaraj Bommai said: “Despite a lot of effort from everyone from the Prime Minister to the workers, we have not been able to succeed.
The result would give a big boost to Congress, which was India’s dominant political party for decades before being defeated by the BJP in national elections in 2014 and 2019.
A senior congressional official attributed the party’s victory to campaigning on local issues.
“This prime minister is divisive and trying to polarize,” said Jairam Ramesh, the secretary-general for communications in Congress. wrote on twitter. “Karnataka’s vote is to build an engine in Bangalore that combines economic growth with social harmony.”
Modi is campaigning in Karnataka with his top deputy and home minister, Amit Shah, and other officials seeking a “twin-engine” government for the state, with the BJP in New Delhi and Bengaluru. Both are in power.
Ahead of the polls, the BJP state government scrapped the 4 percent job quota reserved for minority Muslims under affirmative action and redistributed it to two other disadvantaged groups, a move seen as damaging to its Hindu nationalist base. attraction. Muslims make up about 13% of Karnataka’s population.
The result was clearly a victory for Congress, one analyst said, but noted that most of the party’s gains appeared to have come at the expense of the third-largest party, Janata Dal (the secular party), rather than the BJP.
“This is a big victory for Congress,” said Sugata Srinivasaraju, a Bengaluru-based writer and journalist. “But I wouldn’t extrapolate that and say 2024 is bound to be similar because the BJP seems to have retained its vote share.”
Congress has described the Karnataka vote, along with other upcoming state elections, as stepping stones to rebuild its base across the country.
Additional reporting by Jyotsna Singh in New Delhi