NEW DELHI: Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s election call for a Congress-free India got a serious hearing in four crucial state polls on Thursday though the beleaguered party managed to crawl into the winner’s column in the tiny former French enclave of Puducherry. The Congress had last won some brownie points by hanging on to the coattails of Lalu Yadav and Nitish Kumar duo in Bihar when they together trounced Mr Modi’s party.

The Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) will now form its first ministry in the communally sensitive border state of Assam where the emphatic and foregone ouster of the Congress has given Mr Modi a handy respite from a string of humbling electoral losses.

The communist-led Left Front threw out the Congress from Kerala with a sweeping victory. The Congress suffered blows in West Bengal too where its alliance with the Left Front failed to dislodge Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee’s Trinamool Congress.

In Tamil Nadu, against persistent predictions, the Congress and its ally the Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam came a cropper against Chief Minister J. Jayalalitha’s All India Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam. The former movie actress has kept her sway on the southern state with a clean win.

Modi’s plan for Congress-free India gets a serious hearing

The Congress needed to “move beyond this clichéd introspection business into some serious action”, said former Congress minister Shashi Tharoor, one of the party’s 44 parliamentarians who survived the Modi juggernaut in 2014. He said the election results brought another massive failure for his party.

In the 126-seat Assam assembly the BJP and its allies won 78 seats and Congress only 23. The BJP was leading in another eight constituencies and Congress could pick up two or three more.

Mr Tharoor sought to shield the Gandhi family, saying they could not be held accountable for the Congress debacle, which saw it voted out in Assam and Kerala.

“All state elections are not a referendum on national leadership, there are local issues involved,” Mr Tharoor said, reflecting a traditional Congress refusal to question the Sonia-Rahul Gandhi pair as a driving force.

Rahul Gandhi, the Congress vice president, tweeted that he accepted the people’s verdict with all humility and would focus on improvement. Under his leadership, the Congress slid in the 2014 general election to its worst-ever performance.

Buoyed by its entry in Assam, the BJP said the people had rejected the “opportunistic” and “obstructionist” politics of Congress and had put their stamp on Modi government’s performance. That, of course, will be tested next year when the major state of Punjab and the absolutely vital Uttar Pradesh go to polls. Mr Modi swept Uttar Pradesh in his May 2014 parliamentary outing. The state could play that decisive role again in the 2019 parliamentary contest.

“The unmatched efforts and sacrifice of our workers in Kerala, West Bengal and Tamil Nadu have established a strong party base in these states. Congratulations to workers and leaders of West Bengal, Tamil Nadu, Kerala and Puducherry for their hard work, leading to excellent results,” BJP chief Amit Shah said.

The BJP made a significant entry in Kerala by winning its first seat in the state assembly.

The Left Front’s emphatic victory in Kerala could give the left and liberal sections of Indians a big cause to celebrate. The Left Front took a whopping 91 seats in the 140-member assembly. The Congress-led United Democratic Front got 46 and was leading in a seat.

To rub it in for the Congress, Mr Shah also congratulated workers and leaders of Gujarat for winning the Talala assembly by-poll. The seat has been wrested from Congress.

Foreign Minister Sushma Swaraj said the Assam poll victory was the result of a lifetime of work by workers and leaders in building the organisation.

“My heartfelt gratitude to the people of Assam for electing a BJP government in the state; profound greetings to the BJP workers of Assam. This victory is the result of lifetime work of those who dedicated their lives building the organisation in the northeast. My greetings to BJP president Amit Shah and Prime Minister Narendra Modi,” she said.

The BJP said its winners had for the first time linked Kanyakumari on the southern tip, where its candidate won in Tamil Nadu, to Kashmir in the north, and from western Dwarka in Gujarat to eastern-most Kamrup in Assam.

Published in Dawn, May 20th, 2016