The Bhartiya Janata Party (BJP) has fared poorly in its first electoral test after Operation Sindoor. In five assembly by-polls, spread across four different states, the ruling party has managed to win only one. Although a sample of just five assembly constituencies is small, the wide geographic distribution of its poll losses in all parts of the country West, North, East and South does raise questions on whether the recent Indo-Pak conflict was indeed a political bonus for the party.

Perhaps the most significant defeat for the BJP in the current round of state assembly by-polls came in its political bastion, Gujarat, where the Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) snatched back the Visavadar assembly constituency in a bitterly contested poll battle. Visavadar was one of the five seats that AAP had managed to win in 2022, but within a few years, the BJP, with characteristic skill, had managed to engineer the defection of the former’s legislator, Bhupendra Bhayani. This was one of the many defections in different states that the fledgling party has recently suffered as a result of the no-holds-barred tactics of the ruling party.

When the AAP, instead of being cowed down, put up a former police constable and mercurial Patidar agitation activist, Gopal Italia, as its candidate for Visavadar, the contest became a prestigious one with BJP chief minister Bhupendra Patel and state party president C.R. Patil strenuously campaigning for the defector Bhayani. The triumph of the AAP candidate over his BJP rival by a whopping margin of over 17,000 was........

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