India’s Political Carnival Is Back in Season, With Mixed Results for Modi

In the first test of Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s poll power since his party’s shocking loss of its majority in India’s national elections this summer, two closely watched elections on Tuesday kept the surprises coming.

In the northern state of Haryana, the results for Mr. Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party were surprisingly good: The opposition Congress Party was so heavily favored there that its local leaders were already sparring over the spoils. Instead, the B.J.P. kept its hold on the state and served a warning that exit polls are nothing to bank on.

In the contested territory of Jammu and Kashmir, though, Mr. Modi’s heavy maneuvering to assert B.J.P. ascendance was foiled, and Congress and its allies won overwhelmingly.

India’s states matter in their own right — the biggest have populations to match Brazil’s or Japan’s, and their leaders wield enormous power. But for those hoping to use the results as tea leaves to read the whole country’s political future, the strongest indication was only that India appeared to be reverting to more of its pre-Modi norm, where local issues matter most and coalition building gets tricky.

Until recently, Mr. Modi seemed to work a different kind of magic at the ballot box. His personal image and his evocation of India as a global Hindu power seemed enough to sway even urgent local contests.

Then Indian voters stung him in national parliamentary elections this summer — and flummoxed the pollsters, too. The B.J.P. lost its majority in Parliament. It held on as the single largest party, able to build a coalition and keep Mr. Modi in power, making him the first Indian prime minister to win three consecutive terms since Jawaharlal Nehru, the nation’s first leader. But his air of