Big loss to BJP

Rajasthan, Telangana, Chhattisgarh, Madhya Pradesh and Mizoram went to the polls days apart between 12 November and 7 December. The final results were declared on the morning of 12 December, when counting of votes concluded in Madhya Pradesh after over 24 hours.

It is good news that the Congress is set to form the government in three of these five states — Chhattisgarh, Madhya Pradesh and Rajasthan — while the Telangana Rashtra Samithi (TRS) and Mizoram National Front won their respective states. The BJP was trounced in Chhattisgarh and Rajasthan and lost in a close contest in Madhya Pradesh. In Telangana it manged to win just one seat. Surprisingly, in these States that no one blamed the party top brass although former Chief Minister Shivraj Singh Chouhan took responsibility for the defeat in MP.

In Chhattisgarh, Raman Singh, who, ‘as the Chief Minister’, took responsibility for the BJP's loss in Chhattisgarh. The BJP just wants to hide the failures of Prime Minister Narendra Modi. His high-intensity campaigns primarily focussed on accusing the Nehru-Gandhi family of decades of corruption as well as the BJP's usual Hindutva-leaning goals. Not a lot of this resonated with voters, especially in Chhattisgarh, where the local issues of Naxal threats and the agrarian crisis matter far more than whether a Ram temple would be built in Ayodhya.

- Laksmi Aravinda M, Budwel