The BJP is extremely satisfied with the election results from five states. The saffron flag is hoisting in the northeast for the first time. It is also probably for the first time that Muslim voters in Assam have openly voted for the BJP (nearly 17 per cent of them). With 11 per cent votes, the party got just one per cent less vote than the Congress in West Bengal. In a state such as Kerala, the vote share for the BJP is 14 per cent, which is a significant number. What did the BJP learn from its win in Assam, however? As a prominent party leader, Rajnath Singh said from the party platform, “We gave a clean face to Assam, and the people gave us the power to form the government.” Taking two more steps ahead, Singh also tried to tell the Modi-Shah duo that the party will have to repeat the Assam experiment in UP as well. Even Modi was playing high stakes in Assam; the insider news is that learning from the big loss in Bihar, Modi took the duty of weaving the election strategy away from Shah and gave it to Ram Madhav. Months before the elections, Madhav’s close aide Rajat Sethi rented a three-room flat in Assam and started working in earnest there. To gather as much information as he could about the voters, Sethi set up a cyber army of 400 young people in his war room in Guwahati. It is on Sethi’s insistence that Modi did not make any direct and personal attacks on the then Chief Minister Tarun Gogoi from the Congress. After Assam’s results, Ram Madhav’s clout in the party and Modi durbar has increased. You might even see him as the new strategist for UP elections.