Quick recovery from 2024: BJP has again acquired more political space for manoeuvrability & comfort
Modi finds himself on a stronger footing after the Maharashtra elections. This reverses the tide from the general elections that had, just five months ago, snatched the single-party majority his government had enjoyed since 2014. While allies have given no reason yet to suspect NDA's stability at the Centre, BJP found its big picture shaken and stirred.
For this reason, this claw-back story is important. In the 2024 Lok Sabha polls, the big dent in BJP numbers came from defeats in UP, Maharashtra, Haryana and West Bengal. Over the past five months, BJP has made a strong comeback in two states — Maharashtra and Haryana — while showing shoots of a recovery in UP, where it won 7 of the 9 assembly bypolls. More significantly, it wrested two seats from SP, which had fallen vacant after the party pulled out MLAs to contest parliamentary elections.
BJP, along with RSS, doubled down soon after Lok Sabha polls. It also did some serious post-mortem of the results, made tactical micro-level shifts, continued to focus on women-centric welfare schemes, and ran a bottom-up campaign. But the entire effort rested on a key assumption that the 'Modi vote' had turned complacent. Or, had split up in some parts of the country in the general elections and needed to be stitched back and drawn out. In Maharashtra, particularly, where the assembly turnout jumped by nearly 6% from the Lok Sabha polls, BJP can now believe that the overarching 'Modi narrative' still holds good.
The elections also indicated that the second- and third-rung
