THERE may not have been any elections for a few months, but the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) of India’s prime minister, Narendra Modi, is still winning control of state legislatures. Last week Nitish Kumar, the chief minister of Bihar, who took office at the head of a coalition formed to stop the BJP, jumped ship—to join his erstwhile enemies in a new coalition. Members of the feckless Congress party, which dominated Indian politics until a generation ago, are turning coat, too.
This week Congress’s 44 members of the legislature of Gujarat, Mr Modi’s home state, holed up in the Eagleton Golf Village, a posh resort near Bangalore, the capital of Karnataka, the last big state still controlled by Congress. A party leader says they were fleeing an attempt by the BJP to coerce them into changing sides by means of “muscle power”. More likely they are being protected from “money power” intended to induce them to defect, as five of their colleagues did last week. The inmates at the Eagleton are free to use the sauna and the tennis courts, but not their smartphones. In southern India they call this “resort politics”. At least 100 state legislators from the ruling party in Tamil Nadu were sequestered at the Golden Bay resort near Chennai, the state capital, for 13 days earlier this year, in the middle of a leadership struggle.
Even in Karnataka...Continue reading
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