“A NTI-INCUMBENCY ” has long been an iron rule of Indian elections. Yet that had seemed to change when Narendra Modi led his Bharatiya Janata Party ( BJP ) to national victory in 2014. Wielding the biggest majority in a generation, the new prime minister promised to rid India entirely of Congress, the party that had ruled it for most of the previous five decades. In state after state and vote after vote, the BJP did indeed trounce its doddering rival, spreading a widening swathe of saffron—the colour of Hindu nationalists—across the political map. With a general election due in the spring, and Congress’s toehold having shrunk to just three of India’s 29 states, Mr Modi looked set to waltz into another five-year term.

As the results of voting for five state assemblies trickled in on December 11th, this calculus changed. Two of those states, Telangana and Mizoram, are considered outliers: their polls were won by regional parties with little national influence. But the other three, Chhattisgarh, Madhya Pradesh and Rajasthan, together home to some 168m people, form a giant chunk of the Hindi-speaking heartland that is the BJP ’s base. All three elections pitted incumbent BJP governments against Congress challengers. Polls and pundits had seen just one of them, Rajasthan, as vulnerable to a Congress surge. Instead, India’s grand old party grabbed all three.

The BJP ’s stumble carries implications far beyond these three states. It has dispelled the aura of invincibility that surrounded the BJP and diminished the personal authority, built up over years of vigorous and uniformly successful campaigning, of Mr Modi himself. Conversely, it has transformed Congress’s leader, Rahul Gandhi, from a derided princeling into a credible challenger. Twenty years younger than the 68-year-old Mr Modi, the scion of the Nehru-Gandhi political dynasty seems not only to have halted Congress’s decline, but to have infused new energy since succeeding his mother, Sonia Gandhi, as the party’s president last year.

Shifting popularity ratings aside, the sudden rise in Congress’s fortunes augurs a crucial levelling of the playing field for the forthcoming general election. Indian politics is expensive, and donors disproportionately reward perceived winners. The BJP ’s declared income since 2014 has soared to many multiples of Congress’s shrinking take. That equation will now change, as funders see more potential in the underdogs for future policy pay-offs.

More important still for the national election are the implications of the voting pattern in the three states the BJP lost. Of the 545 seats in the lower house of the national parliament the trio account for 65, of which the BJP holds 59. Given the typically close correlation between state and national results, that number will surely fall in the national vote. Moreover the outcome in Madhya Pradesh and Rajasthan may give a sense of public sentiment in the neighbouring, far bigger state of Uttar Pradesh, which furnishes another 68 of the BJP ’s 273 MP s, and whose electorate is concerned by similar issues. Neelanjan Sircar of the Centre for Policy Research, a think-tank in Delhi, is categorical about the party’s chances in the spring. “If they perform in national elections the way they did yesterday, they stand no chance of winning.”

Even so, Congress should not be gloating. Its wins in Madhya Pradesh and Rajasthan were razor-thin. Mr Gandhi still faces an uphill battle to impress voters as a statesman of equal gravitas to Mr Modi. The party seems to have benefited by emulating the BJP ’s appeals to Hindu identity in place of its traditional secularism. But Mr Gandhi’s much-hyped visits to temples and promises to protect cows (and promote the healing powers of their urine) have done nothing to give his party a clear ideological identity. It will still need to patch together a wide coalition of unlikely bedfellows, including regional strongmen, to challenge the BJP nationally.

As for Mr Modi’s party, most observers predict not a period of introspection, but a doubling down. If the BJP ’s recent state campaigns are an indicator, the party may amplify rhetoric intended to polarise the electorate along sectarian lines. A recent, controversial change of personnel at the top of the central bank, in which a compliant bureaucrat replaced a respected economist who had resisted pressure to go easy on badly run banks, suggests that Mr Modi may also plump for what Andy Mukherjee, a financial columnist, terms “a market-pleasing credit binge”.