PM Modi at BJP headquarters.
Credit: PTI photo
New Delhi: Setting the tone for the upcoming six assembly elections in the coming year, prime minister Narendra Modi, in his address to party workers at the BJP headquarters on Friday evening, said the Bihar election results is the “biggest mandate for the NDA since 2010”.
Attacking the Congress over issues of nationalism, the prime minister set the cat among the pigeons and made a prediction that the Congress will soon split.
Modi also said that Bihar has chosen to vote for a new MY formula – mahila (women) and youth. He said that the verdict was a special win for women, who had faced the brunt of “jungle raj” under Lalu Prasad’s rule.
“Bihar is among the states with the highest number of young people, today they have shattered the old, communal MY Formula of Jungle Raj with a new positive ‘MY Formula’ – women and youth,” Modi said. He also praised Nitish Kumar’s leadership and said it played a key role in the NDA’s landslide victory.
For the BJP leadership, which is now staring at organisational issues with the tenure of the president having ended long ago, it will now come from a position of strength to settle these issues. Organisational appointments in key states like Uttar Pradesh and Karnataka are pending before they move on to the BJP presidential elections.
Taking a swipe at Congress leader and Lok Sabha LoP Rahul Gandhi’s “vote chori” allegations, Modi congratulated the Election Commission for successfully carrying out the SIR exercise and the elections without any incident, and pointed at the massive voter turnout. “There are some who targeted the ECI, but the people of Bihar have given them a stern response with their votes,” Modi said.
The prime minister also said that he will feed “makhana kheer” to all the party workers. He also made a special mention of the party’s state unit president and deputy CM leader Samrat Choudhary as well as Lok Janshakti Party (RV) chief Chirag Paswan.
Modi’s assertion that the win is a “blockbuster performance” stems from the BJP’s own victory within NDA’s impressive wins. For the BJP, this will mark the first time it will be the single-largest party in Bihar. The last time that the BJP won big was in 2010, when it won 91 seats and was behind only JDU which won 115 seats. While the final tally is yet to emerge, the BJP’s vote share is touching 20%, a slight improvement from the 19.46% it managed in 2020, but behind its 2015 vote-share of 24.42% – which has been its highest vote share.
More than the numbers, what it means for the BJP is that it will now no longer play second fiddle to Nitish Kumar and the JDU. In 2020, when the BJP and the JDU had contested on 110 and 115 seats respectively, the BJP won 74 and Nitish only 43. But the JDU voteshare of 32.83% was miles ahead of the BJP’s.