In the end, the writing was on the wall.
Exit polls after the May 10 voting in the southern Indian state of Karnataka had projected that the opposition Congress party stood a better chance of forming the next government than the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) of Prime Minister Narendra Modi, which was in power.
Yet few would have predicted the scale of the Congress victory, coming against the backdrop of the BJP’s dominance over Indian politics in recent years, and the governing party’s ability to form governments even in states where it fails to secure a majority — often using controversial means.
On Saturday, the Congress managed to win 135 of the 224 seats in the Karnataka Legislative Assembly despite those odds, securing 43 percent votes, 5 percent more than in the previous 2018 election, and 7 percent more than the BJP this time. Modi’s party, which had won 104 seats in 2018, had to settle for 66 this time. The Janata Dal (Secular), or JD-S, the third major party in the state, got 19 seats.
Central to that outcome were local political factors, said analysts. And while reverberations from the result will echo in the BJP headquarters in New Delhi, they do not necessarily portend a dramatic shift in the national mood against the incumbent prime minister.