Narendra Modi's apparent lack of interest in the mounting body-count from the pandemic has shaken India's confidence in his leadership
IN THE HOME state of Narendra Modi, India’s prime minister, a person too clever by half is said to have won the house, but lost Gujarat. Through March and April, political pundits voiced the Gujarati proverb as a warning. So fiercely were Mr Modi and his Bharatiya Janata party fighting to win elections in another state, West Bengal, that they risked losing a bigger prize.
Yet it was in West Bengal that Mr Modi suffered the greatest humiliation. The prime minister himself had hosted some 20 giant rallies across the state, and devoted immense amounts of money and manpower to the fight. His closest henchman and electoral supremo, Amit Shah, the home minister, brashly predicted that the BJP would grab more than 200 of the state assembly’s 294 seats. The outcome was precisely the opposite. Mr Modi’s party captured just 77 seats.
The party’s campaign in West Bengal was ugly even by the often unseemly standards of Indian politics. Mr Shah repeatedly insinuated that local Muslims are in fact dangerous Bangladeshi “infiltrators” out to steal “Indian” jobs. He excoriated Ms Banerjee for “appeasing” them with handouts. Other figures in the party publicly gloated when Muslim voters were shot dead by police during a fracas at a polling booth.
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