NEW DELHI: Having registered a landslide victory in the Lok Sabha elections, Prime Minister Narendra Modi assured the nation that he will not take any decision with bad intentions while stating that only two castes remain in the country — the poor and those who contribute to remove poverty.
Modi also asserted that his government and the BJP would remain humble in the face of the massive victory.
In his victory speech at the BJP headquarters, Modi pointed out that opposition parties did not flog the secularism card this time around.
“Not a single party in the 2019 Lok Sabha elections wore the veil of secularism. The drama seen for 20 years went missing. They couldn’t muster the courage to exploit the bogey of secularism in elections,” Modi claimed, in an apparent reference to the Congress, the Trinamool Congress and the Samajwadi Party not making attempts to polarise their minority vote base fearing counter-polarisation amongst Hindus.
He also noted that issues of corruption and price rise, which otherwise had been regular features in previous elections, also went missing in the 2019 elections.
Saffron forts remain loyal to Modi
EIGHT states which delivered 178 Lok Sabha seats to the BJP’s kitty in the 2014 general elections remained saffron forts in 2019 as well. The BJP’s tally came down by 8, with the loss of 9 seats in Uttar Pradesh accounted for. The eight states — UP, Jharkhand, Himachal Pradesh, Madhya Pradesh, Rajasthan, Goa, Chhattisgarh and Gujarat — had accounted for 178 seats out of the 282 constituencies won by the saffron outfit last time.
In UP, the BJP’s tally came down from 71 to 62. But the party was still far ahead of its rivals. However, the eight states have contributed heavily in taking the BJP’s overall tally to the triple century mark. Rajasthan, MP and Chhattisgarh had ducked the saffron tide in the December 2018 Assembly elections and voted the Congress into power.
Yet, the three states, on the back of an upsurge in the voters’ turnout, threw opposite results in the Lok Sabha elections by nearly blanking out the Congress.
Even Gujarat, where the Congress had given a scare to the BJP in the 2017 Assembly elections, endorsed brand Modi once again to deliver a perfect 26 into the saffron kitty. In Rajasthan, the BJP, despite losing the Assembly polls six months ago, repeated the 2014 verdict with the perfect 25 figure for the saffron outfit.
The Modi magic vanquished even Chief Minister Ashok Gehlot’s son Vaibhav, who contested from Jodhpur.
Unlike the Congress, the BJP steered clear of infighting in MP to register the best-ever figure of 28 out of 29 Lok Sabha seats in the state.
The saffron wave swept away bigwigs like veteran Digvijaya Singh in Bhopal and young gun Jyotiraditya Scindia in his bastion, Guna.
In Chhattisgarh, too, the BJP scripted a 360-degree spin. After a rout in the Assembly polls, the party saw a dramatic turnaround, winning 10 out of 11 Lok Sabha seats. The BJP retained electoral dominance in Jharkhand as well.
Voters in Varanasi see divine hand in victory
In Narendra Modi’s constituency Varanasi, many see a divine hand in the BJP’s landslide victory, which also saw the PM romp home with a bigger margin from Lord Shiva’s city this time.
“Prime Minister Narendra Modi has once again got the blessings of Baba Kashi Vishwanath, Kashi’s guardian Kaal Bhairav and Maa Ganga,” pointed out Shyam Kumar Pandey, owner of a saree-making unit. Modi defeated his nearest rival, SP’s Shalini Yadav, by a margin of nearly 4.80 lakh votes.
In 2014, the PM had routed Aam Aadmi Party leader Arvind Kejriwal by over 3.70 lakh votes. Varanasi’s denizens also pointed to the work done by the PM for the constituency over the past five years, which includes the construction of a corridor to provide easier access to the Kashi Vishwanath temple.
Prajanath Misra, the district unit president of the Congress, agreed that the results reflected the mood of the people in Varanasi. “It also shows the shortcoming in our management,” he said.