New Delhi, Sept. 16: The Indian voter has used the bypolls to deliver multiple birthday-eve messages to a silent Narendra Modi.

What goes up must come down, especially after a “wave election”;

You can’t win all the elections all the time with the polarisation card;

You focused on governance (you call it “development”) in the summer elections and you reaped dividends. When some of your supporters raked up inflammatory issues, you managed to bring the development debate back on track;

Yogi Adityanath and his scurrilous statement were the big issues in the bypolls in Uttar Pradesh. You not only remained silent but also seemed to endorse him by making him the lead speaker in Parliament during a debate;

Local issues and countless other factors still play a role in Indian elections. We don’t have “presidential-style” elections all the time;

Amit Shah delivered in the summer. That does not mean you don’t need anyone else in other seasons;

One other thing — as Steve Jobs would say before breaking big Apple news — India is not yet “Congress-mukt”. Probably even to the surprise of the Congress, the down-and-out erstwhile ruling party has embarrassed the BJP, of all the places, in Gujarat (see chart above). A point to note: Rahul Gandhi was not in town when news came in that his pet-plank — anti-communalism — was holding out.

Moral: 100 days are too short a period to deliver. But the summer hype was such that it was made to appear that achchhe din were round the corner. Hyperbole works when you are challenging an incumbent government but boomerangs when you are in power. Best option: focus on the economy and make people feel good in tangible ways.

The bypoll results have shocked the BJP in Uttar Pradesh, stunned it in Rajasthan and shamed it in Gujarat, denying Prime Minister Modi the birthday gift promised by his political protégé, Anandiben Patel.

Anandiben, who succeeded Modi as Gujarat chief minister, had declared that when her mentor turned 64 tomorrow, her present would be a Perfect 10 victory for the BJP in the nine Assembly seats and one parliamentary seat.

The BJP kept the Vadodara Lok Sabha seat, which Modi had vacated for Varanasi. But the BJP lost to the Congress three of the Assembly seats it had won in the last elections.

In Gujarat, the BJP had a record of winning every by-election in recent years, barring one in Mansa in 2012.

Gujarat was not the only state where the BJP suffered a setback.

On a day it expected to make a clean sweep of Rajasthan and Uttar Pradesh, it lost three of the four seats it held in the desert state to the Congress.

In Uttar Pradesh, the Samajwadi Party bounced back, wresting eight of the 11 Assembly seats, all of which previously belonged to the BJP. The BJP could keep only three: Saharanpur, Lucknow East and Noida.

Multiple factors contributed to the BJP’s dismal showing in the heartland. First, its agenda to polarise the polity using issues such as the “love jihad” bogey didn’t take off because the context for an impact was missing.

In May, the BJP effortlessly played on communal sentiments because of a perception that the Samajwadi Party had gone overboard with “minority appeasement”. The BJP’s erstwhile coalition of upper castes, backward classes and Dalits appears to have come unstuck in the bypolls.

A purported tactical retreat by Mayawati, which may have sent the Dalit votes to the Samajwadis, also made a big difference. Many places the Samajwadis won today have a significant Dalit presence.

The BJP suffered several ignominies in the process. Rohaniya, an Assembly segment in Modi’s Varanasi seat, went to the Samajwadis. It was contested by Krishna Patel of the Apna Dal, a BJP ally. Her daughter Anupriya held this seat until she became an MP.

The BJP had assumed that with Modi’s “prestige” at stake and with the Apna Dal commanding the support of Rohaniya’s dominant Kurmi votes, Krishna would have a cakewalk.

The BJP’s losses appeared to crystallise a pattern whose first threads emerged when the BJP suffered a defeat in the bypolls in Uttarakhand, held soon after its massive Lok Sabha victory. This was followed by reversals in the Bihar and Karnataka by-elections.

While the initial upsets were explained away as “minor ones”, today’s outcome left the BJP shell-shocked because, for the first time, it felt that its Gujarat and Rajasthan strongholds were being “seriously challenged”, a source conceded.

The BJP hopes to “cull lessons” from the Uttar Pradesh reverses and get its house in order before the Assembly elections due in 2017 but sources said Rajasthan and Gujarat called for “immediate introspection”.

Armed with a two-thirds majority after the 2013 state elections, Vasundhara Raje worked hard to ensure the BJP won every one of Rajasthan’s 25 Lok Sabha seats.

The more objective voices in the BJP conceded that Vasundhara, regarded as reclusive in her previous tenure, had morphed into a people-friendly chief minister with the launch of her “sarkar aapke dwaar” (government at your doorstep) programme that took her and her officials to far-flung villages.

Among the schemes on her anvil were attracting labour-intensive businesses and allowing ration shops to double as outlets for products made by private companies. Vasundhara also reformed Rajasthan’s labour laws.

In sync with her outlook that people should “minimise their dependence on the government”, Vasundhara did away with some of her predecessor Ashok Gehlot’s populist schemes that the electorate had rejected.

Asked what caused the bypoll losses, a tentative assessment from a BJP source was “she failed to communicate her achievements on the ground because of non-cooperation from a section of the party”— a trend that had done Vasundhara in six years ago in 2008.

Vasundhara’s detractors cited her choice of Digamber Singh as the candidate from Surajgarh. Singh, the critics claimed, belonged to Bharatpur that was miles away and could not speak Surajgarh’s Shekhawati dialect. “People on the ground, including our BJP workers, were so upset they decided to teach Vasundhara a lesson and voted for the Congress candidate,” a source said.

Her detractors alleged that she had “gone back to becoming inaccessible to the MLAs and even the ministers”.

Rajasthan’s neighbour, Gujarat, had other issues. Sources said “bad” candidate selection, failure to get the local caste equations right and the “absence” of Modi from the scene contributed to the depletion of three seats.

The bypolls were supposed to be the first “litmus test” of Anandiben’s electoral skills. “She is not a patch on Narendrabhai,” pronounced a Gujarat BJP legislator.

Both women are in for tough times, said BJP sources.