NEW DELHI: India’s ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) suffered a major setback on Tuesday in key state polls seen as a test of Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s popularity, the most damaging being the results for the politically vital Uttar Pradesh assembly.

The party together with a local ally had fielded 11 candidates in the most populous state but it could win only three seats. The state’s ruling Samajwadi Party wrested seven seats held by the BJP and retained one of its own. The tactical absence of the pro-Dalit Bahujan Samaj Party from the fray contributed to the results going against the BJP.

In a nutshell, four months after its stunning victory in the Lok Sabha elections, Mr Modi’s party lost 13 of the 23 seats held by it in Uttar Pradesh, Rajasthan and Gujarat . The only solace for the BJP came from West Bengal, where it won the Basirhat seat.

The results come close on the heels of the party’s disappointing performance in the assembly by-polls in Bihar, Uttarakhand, Karnataka and Madhya Pradesh in the last two months.

However, even as opposition parties termed the BJP’s setback a reality check for its “acche din” slogan, the party was quick to shield Mr Modi and his government from any negative impact of the results.

Equally crushing was the defeat in Rajasthan where BJP conceded three of the four seats to the Congress, which also managed to wrest three of the nine seats in Gujarat, where the elections were held for the first time in 12 years with Mr Modi at the helm.

The BJP’s losses in the by-elections took some sheen off Mr Modi’s homecoming, his first visit to Gujarat on Tuesday after he took over as prime minister in May this year.

He was last there to thank the people of his state for the spectacular victory in the Lok Sabha elections that it contributed to by handing the BJP all 26 seats.

Four months later, as he landed in Gandhinagar, the Congress had won three of nine assembly seats for which by-elections were held. It has won at the cost of the BJP, which had vacated all those seats after its legislators became MPs.

The Congress termed the results of the nine state by-polls a “good omen” for secular forces and said it should ring alarm bells in the saffron party as people had rejected the “politics of polarisation”.

Saying that “Modi (government’s) honeymoon period with the people was over”, party spokesperson Shakeel Ahmed sought to portray the verdict in Uttar Pradesh as “the vote against BJP more than in favour of any party”.

He also acknowledged that the Congress could not perform to its expectations in the state by not winning a single seat, but recalled that in the Lok Sabha elections too, it had won only in two — Sonia and Rahul Gandhi — of the 80 parliamentary constituencies.

Mr Ahmed claimed that anti-incumbency factor had set in within 100 days of the Modi government coming to power.

“People did not like the attitude of BJP and Modi government. While the prime minister himself kept silent, BJP leaders and ministers in the Modi government played the politics of polarisation with their statements. People of Uttar Pradesh have rejected BJP’s politics of hate mongering.”

Published in Dawn, September 17th, 2014