With recent wins in Himachal Pradesh and Gujarat, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) is now in power in 19 of 29 Indian states, the best performance by an Indian political party since 1993, when the Congress or allied parties ran 18 of 26 states.
But while the BJP’s performance in Gujarat–where it lost 16 seats, declining from 115 to 99–may not be satisfactory to itself and reveals future electoral risks, it may not herald a Congress comeback in the 2019 general elections, political commentator Suhas Palshikar–chief editor of a political journal–told us.
This has been Congress’s best performance