Indian PM's Party Defeated in Delhi State Election
KINKADE: You're watching CNN, and this is CONNECT THE WORLD with me, Lynda Kinkade. Welcome back. It's not often that the tax man wins a popularity contest, but in India, that's exactly what happened. Former tax official and anti-corruption activist Arvind Kejriwal has delivered a huge blow to Prime Minister Narendra Modi. His Common Man Party is projected to win up to 90 percent of the seats in the election for the Delhi state legislature. It's a shock for the previously popular Modi, who won the general election with a landslide victory less than a year ago. CNN's Sumnima Udas is in New Delhi and explains what this means for Mr. Modi and the winning Common Man Party.</s>SUMNIMA UDAS, CNN INTERNATIONAL CORRESPONDENT: The celebrations began even before the official results were announced. The two-year-old Aam Aadmi Party, or Common Man Party, has just won the New Delhi assembly elections by a landslide. And its support that means for the first time Narendra Modi and his BJP Party has lost a major election.</s>UNIDENTIFIED MALE: (Inaudible). This is call for (inaudible), a sign for Modi, and I think it should away from its last sweep. Honeymoon period is over.</s>UDAS: Aam Aadmi, the party of bureaucrats, lawyers, teachers, many of them are very young. And the face of the party, Arvind Kejriwal, is young himself at 46, and a party symbol, the broom, a sign of how they want to clean up the system from corruption. Delhi only accounts for 2 percent of India's population, but what happens here reverberates across the nation. It gets incredible amounts of media coverage and, well, it's the seat of Indian power. And having an adversarial chief minister whose known for his socialist policies right under the nose of business-friendly Prime Minister Narendra Modi is undoubtedly going to change the India narrative. Sumnima Udas, CNN, New Delhi.</s>KINKADE: Narendra Modi appeared at New York's Madison Square Garden last year, and this is the reception he got.</s>KINKADE: More fitting for a rock star than a politician. Tens of thousands of people turned out to greet him and listen to his speech. But less than a year later, his popularity appears to be waning, while that of Arvind Kejriwal from the relatively new Common Man Party is rising steadily. To explain how this shift in popularity has happened and what it means going -- what it means for India, I'm joined by Gardiner Harris, the South Asia correspondent for "The New York Times." Thanks so much for joining us. Firstly, how has this huge defeat come about? Was it out of the blue, or was this expected?</s>GARDINER HARRIS, SOUTH ASIA CORRESPONDENT, "THE NEW YORK TIMES": Completely out of the blue. Nobody expected this. I certainly didn't either. But what's going on here, Lynda, is that India's political reality and its demographic reality are on two very separate tracks. Politically, India has always had very slow reforms, has been very hesitant on changing the system that radically. Demographically, though, 12 million people will come of age this year in India. In 6 or 7 more years, it's going to be 17 million. In 15 more years, it's going to be 26 million people coming of age. That's more than live in Australia at this point. And India has never produced more than 2 million jobs in any one year. This year, with 12 million people coming of age, fewer than a million jobs will be available for them. So there is this groundswell of desperation and anger coming up into India that Modi is going to have to deal with and deal with quickly.</s>KINKADE: As you said, this is Modi's first blow since he won the election last year. Can we see this as a personal vote against him? Or was it partly the fact that the opposition ran a good campaign?</s>HARRIS: I think obviously there's a little bit of both. But Modi made a huge personal appeal in this election. He led the campaign. It was his face on all the posters. He put himself front and center in this election, so he cannot say that he was not important to it. And over my shoulder is this enormous city called New Delhi, 25 million people. And in that city are 8 million people, roughly the size of New York City, who don't have access to water, who don't have access to power, who don't have toilets. And those people are deeply unhappy about this, and they're the ones who came out in such great numbers to support Arvind Kejriwal, who promised to deliver those basic services. Bisli and pani (ph). In Hindi, that is electricity and water. They were promises he repeated over and over and over again, and they resonated really strongly here.</s>KINKADE: Now, I want to take a look at a quick image that made headlines recently. It was of the prime minister wearing a suit he wore when he met President Barack Obama last year.</s>HARRIS: Right.</s>KINKADE: You can see in the pinstripes, if you look closely, it's actually Minister Modi's name. It reportedly cost about $18,000, ten times the average Indian wage. Can you tell us what you make of that? Does that suggest that he is out of touch with voters, even in Delhi, which is obviously one of the wealthiest cities in the country?</s>HARRIS: So, one of Modi's great strengths in his campaign last year was that he was the son of a chaiwala, a tea seller. That he came from the backward castes in India. It was a huge talking point for him, because in both the National Congress Party and in the BJP, those parties have long been dominated by high-caste Indians. So, here came a man of great modest upbringing. But in the months since his election, he has come out with sort of sartorial splendor, incredibly expensive suits. He's flying around in private jets. He is clearly projecting himself as a very well-to-do, highly-placed person. And Arvind Kejriwal, by contrast, wraps his head in cheap scarves. He wears the same tattered dark, Western clothing that the lower classes here wear. So, one got the sense that Modi had sort of forgotten one of the great messages that he had brought to the campaign, which was that he was just like most of the electoral people here. And that was a message that Arvind Kejriwal brought very strongly.</s>KINKADE: Well, this may be a bit of a wake-up call for Mr. Modi. Thank you so much for joining us, Gardiner Harris. We appreciate it.</s>HARRIS: Glad to -- sure.</s>KINKADE: Now, live from CNN Center, this is CONNECT THE WORLD. Coming up, Samsung says there may be some confusion about its new smart TV. How the electronics maker is responding to complaints the TV sets could listen in on your private conversations. That's coming up next.