While the NDA’s landslide victory in Maharashtra and the ease with which the INDIA bloc retained Jharkhand have hogged the headlines, the results of 46 assembly bypolls across the country held together also tell their own story of Indian politics today.

The most important takeaway from the assembly bypolls is from the country’s most populous and politically crucial state, Uttar Pradesh, in which the ruling BJP was stunned by the Samajwadi Party in the Lok Sabha polls with the former winning only 33/80 seats.

There is little doubt that after its dismal performance in the Lok Sabha polls, the BJP’s central leadership, as well as the ever-triumphalist duo of Prime Minister Narendra Modi and Home Minister Amit Shah, were humbled into a far more collaborative if not conciliatory relationship with Yogi Adityanath as well as the RSS ahead of the assembly bypolls. The bypolls were given top priority with everyone realising that if the BJP started badly sliding in Uttar Pradesh, the party’s hold over the country would become increasingly shaky, particularly in a Lok Sabha where it was well short of a clear majority of its own.

As for the Samajwadi party, which had shown great promise in the Lok Sabha polls, its leader Akhilesh Yadav appeared to underestimate the BJP’s ability to reinvent itself and crawl back into the political game. It is clear that the Yadav chieftain is far from attaining the political acumen of his father Mulayam Singh Yadav, from his party’s baffling rout in the Muslim majority assembly constituency of Kundarka, which should have been in the Samajwadi Party’s bag.

While the BJP will no doubt be relieved at setting its house in order in Uttar Pradesh, it cannot but be distressed at the hammering it has taken in the hands of the Mamata Banerjee-led Trinamool Congress in the six bypolls held in West Bengal. This was the first electoral test of the feisty chief minister after months and months of a campaign against her by both political opponents and the media, spearheaded by the BJP for being personally responsible for the horrendous rape and murder of a woman doctor in a Kolkata hospital several months ago.

Mamata Banerjee and her party apparatus has shown that despite the hundreds of protest demonstrations against her, they failed to even slightly dent the continuing popular support for her evident in the Lok Sabha polls as well.

The results speak for themselves. The victory margin of Trinamool candidates was huge: two of them with over 130000 votes, massive in assembly terms, and its lowest win margin was 28,168 votes in Madarihat, a seat that was with the BJP for the last eight years.

As for the Congress, the results present a mixed bag. There was good news from the South, with the massive victory of Priyanka Gandhi's debut to the Lok Sabha from Wayanad in Kerala, by a record four lakh vote margin. Again, it showed that the BJP has failed to make much headway even against the Congress when faced with strong local leaders, like Karnataka chief minister Siddaramaiah and D K Shivakumar, and in Kerala where it is unable to cross the political firewall created by the United Democratic Front and Left Democratic Front.

In Rajasthan, however, the Congress was humiliated, finishing third in as many as four constituencies and allowing the BJP to win five out of the seven assembly bypolls. The party also lost in the sole assembly bypoll in Chhattisgarh but put up a slightly better fight in Madhya Pradesh where it defeated a BJP cabinet minister, and significantly reduced the victory margin of the BJP candidate standing from former chief minister Shivraj Singh Chauhan’s constituency.

For Prime Minister Modi and the BJP, with the NDA winning not just a landslide victory in the prestigious state of Maharashtra elections but also bagging 26 out of the 46 assembly bypolls along with a huge comeback in Uttar Pradesh, and sweeping Bihar and the Northeast, it will be a welcome reprieve from the question mark that hung over the regime after it got clearly awakened during the Lok Sabha polls.

Nevertheless, this is no reason for the Opposition to roll over and die. As shown by Heman Soren in Jharkhand, Mamata Banerjee in West Bengal, and the Karnataka Congress leaders, it is possible to fight the Delhi Sultanate and its cohorts across various states through sound grassroots politics, not ideological posturing or parliamentary rhetoric.

Most importantly, Rahul Gandhi and other Opposition leaders need to recognise that the fading appeal of Prime Minister Modi as an invincible wizard after a decade, is not enough to ensure victory because he may well be the tip of a saffron iceberg far more difficult to dislodge.

(The writer is a Delhi-based senior journalist and the author of ‘Behenji: A Political Biography of Mayawati’. This is an opinion piece. The views expressed above are the author’s own. The Quint neither endorses nor is responsible for the same.)