Glory and glee...... BJP's blistering bounceback

TT, New Delhi: The BJP has smashed the Left citadel in Tripura and conquered wide swathes of the Northeast that was once considered a frontier forever out of its reach.

In Nagaland, the BJP is priming itself to share power with an ally while in Meghalaya, the party is gearing up to compete with the incumbent Congress to tilt the balance in a hung House. (See charts)

The crowning glory was the Tripura show: the BJP alone won 35 (43 with its ally) of the 60 seats, compared with zero in 2013. "A journey from shunya (zero) to shikhar (the peak)," Prime Minister Narendra Modi tweeted.

Several Opposition parties tried to downplay the significance of the Northeast results but there is little doubt that they have offered the BJP a boost after it lost ground in the Assembly polls in Gujarat as well as the bypolls in Rajasthan and Madhya Pradesh.

The setbacks in the strongholds, coupled with a lacklustre budget and the Nirav Modi scandal, had taken the sheen off the "Modi magic" - a part of which the party can claim to have redeemed through its performance in the Northeast.

The BJP has gained ever-more acceptability in the Northeast, including the Christian-dominated states.

On the ground in Agartala, delirious BJP supporters, many of them part of a formidable armada of Sangh volunteers, pointed out that the pleasure of vanquishing communists could never be matched by any other victory.

The Left is the main ideological adversary of the BJP, and party president Amit Shah has declared that the new battlegrounds are Kerala, the sole state where the Left is in power now, and Bengal, where the BJP seeks to fill the vacuum left by the Left to unseat the Trinamul Congress.

But the joy of defeating the CPM could not prevent Narendra Modi and Shah from taking pot shots at Rahul Gandhi. "There are leaders whose designation rises while their stature shrinks," the Prime Minister said.

Most of the jokes may be on the Left but the Congress has cut an equally sorry figure. While the Left has preserved a significant part of its vote share in Tripura (42.7 per cent against the BJP's 43 per cent), the Congress has drawn a blank in Nagaland and Tripura.

The results further indicate that the Congress has completely ceded ground in the Northeast, which was once considered its loyal bastion. The blow has fallen ahead of the polls in Karnataka, where the Congress is in power.