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How Modi Snatched Defeat from the Jaws of Victory

Post Bihar verdict, the Prime Minister Narendra Modi and BJP president Amit Shah will become loners. They lost miserably. The team has itself to blame because of some cardinal sins it committed. Otherwise things could have been different.

It snatched defeat from the jaws of victory. 

Arrogance, complacency, over-confidence, under estimating the opponent come into play.
Nitish defeated Modi+Amit in their own game

-RSS chief Mohan Bhagwat played a spoiler in an otherwise smooth campaigning of the BJP. His statement on reservation did bulk of the damage. The team appeared incompetent and did little to restore it.
-Not declaring the chief ministerial candidate was a strategy, and this strategy did go woefully wrong. 
-Dadri is very far away from Bihar, but Lalu capitalised on the the issue at his turf in his own style.
-The dal crisis was not managed at all by the Centre
-Two Lok Sabha MPs from Bihar - Shatrughan Sinha and RK Singh - openly aired their grievances in public, giving the impression that the BJP stands as a divided family.
-The PM's narrative began with DNA, and went on to BIMARU, beef ban, jantar-mantar, reservation and so on. What was the need of making a remark like  'fire crackers in Pakistan' ? They all fell flat. 
-The BJP did not seem to have learnt from the humiliating defeat it suffered in the February 2015 Delhi elections. The people of Delhi, a big number of them from Bihar voted both Cong and BJP out.

Observing Narendra Modi+Amit Shah rule India today, one regrets a lost opportunity. Their victory in May 2014 had offered hope to millions. Sixteen months later, one struggles to find any sustained commitment from their side that could suggest that they genuinely mean welfare of the masses. Their recent speeches at the Election rallies in Bihar showed no positive aspects of their programs. 



There appears to be no honest drive to be seen in Modi's efforts. Although, his foreign trips are more visible. His excessive reliance on populist slogans — of which there have been more in his 16 months in office, than in all of Lalu Yadav+Nitish Kumar years in power. In any case, how is ‘Sabka Saath, Sabka Vikas' any less banal than Lalu's ‘Samajik Nyaya, Mandal’. And in terms of sheer rhetoric — supposedly Modi’s forte — the latter slogans have won hands down.