All eyes are on Bihar as the winner of the state assembly elections will be known in a few hours from now.

Saurabh Mukherjea, Founder of Marcellus Investment Managers and Ruben Banerjee, Editor-In-Chief of Outlook India discussed the possible outcomes and the likely implications.

According to Ruben Banerjee, “It necessarily does not mean that loss for the NDA in Bihar will have a huge impact at the Centre because this may not necessarily mean that people are tired of Narendra Modi or the BJP. If you look at Delhi, Orissa people have voted for one party in local election and another party at the central. So I don’t think it is a make or break for NDA.”

He added, “Say suppose if the NDA is to lose in Bihar by the end of the day and if Nitish Kumar is voted out of power it could be a blessing in disguise for the BJP because the BJP has been kind of a player in sometime but they were piggybacking on somebody else.”

Speaking from the market’s perspective, “There are two lines of thinking here. One is through the summer as BJP was expediting fairly momentous regulatory change, the land reform, the labour reform, and we figured out going in to the Bihar election that BJP very shrewdly, I think they have done the math that the Rajya Sabha situation will look increasingly precarious for them in the coming years in light of the reversals they had in the Assembly Elections over the last couple of years.”

“As an investor if the BJP losses today I will see it as a positive because my reckoning is this will galvanise the BJP high command to do more to stimulate the economy, to get the country back to 7-8 percent growth.”

“COVID has made things difficult for ordinary people in our country and therefore the Union Budget in February will have a very powerful growth thrust to it,” Mukherjea added.

Watch this video for more.

(Edited by : Santosh Nair)

First Published:Nov 10, 2020 10:55 AM IST