Following are excerpts from a report in Indian Express.

The JD(U) thinks the efforts of a section of the BJP to prop up Gujarat Chief Minister Narendra Modi as the future prime ministerial candidate of the NDA have contributed to the defeat of the alliance. This reaction of the JD(U) puts a question mark over Modi’s plans for the future.

Asked if the Modi issue was one of the factors which played against the NDA, JD(U) president and NDA acting convenor Sharad Yadav told reporters on Sunday that it was indeed so. He felt this caused confusion in the minds of people. “The issue should have been dismissed immediately,” he said.

Yadav had not relished the “draft-Modi-for-PM-campaign” when some BJP leaders floated the idea in the midst of the campaign. “There is no vacancy,” Yadav had said, citing the fact that senior BJP leader L K Advani had been already projected as the prime ministerial candidate.

… Contrary to the hype during the campaign, the Modi factor had failed to work to the advantage of the BJP. At the end of the day, the party has registered a gain of just one seat in his home state Gujarat. In Maharashtra, where Modi held charge, the BJP tally has actually gone down. And, notwithstanding the hectic campaign of the saffron brotherhood’s poster boy, the BJP has faced a rout in Orissa, UP, Rajasthan, Uttarakhand and Haryana, where he was touted as a star campaigner.

Orissa was supposed to be the most fertile ground for introducing Modi. The atmosphere was communally polarised in the aftermath of the Kandhamal violence and the BJP was free to return to its own agenda and ideology after breaking up with BJD. However, nothing worked.

Thank God the BJP plan for Orissa, as mentioned in the above paragraph, did not work.As we reported earlier in http://www.orissalinks.com/orissagrowth/archives/2148 and http://www.orissalinks.com/orissagrowth/archives/2133 the BJD countered Modi’s introduction to Orissa, and that plus the inherent peaceful and non-communal nature of Oriyas saved Orissa.

 

As the last paragraph of the quote above illustrates, there is a widespread (wrong) impression that Orissa was communally polarised.

 

That is not true and the proof is how BJP fared in Orissa. In Kandhamala parliamentary constituency itself the BJP candidate Ashok Sahu, who was accused and jailed for hate speech, lost. However in two assembly constituencies in Kandhamala BJP won. At best one can say that Kandhamala was communally poarised. Saying Orissa was communally polarised is as wrong as saying India was communally polarised. Outside of Kandhamala there was zero communal polarisation. PERIOD. Note that unlike Post-Godhra in 2002 or the sikh killings in 1984 the violence in Kandhamala did not spread outside of Kandhamala.