A Defeat for Modi’s Party in South India Heartens His Rivals

Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s ruling party on Saturday lost its only state government in India’s relatively prosperous south, results from elections in Karnataka showed, in a boost to the otherwise struggling opposition ahead of general elections next year.

The Indian National Congress, which governed India for much of its time since independence before being sidelined by the rise of Mr. Modi and his Bharatiya Janata Party, was winning a majority of the seats in the local assembly elections in Karnataka.

Home to more than 65 million people and India’s cash-rich tech hub, Karnataka is the only southern state where Mr. Modi’s Hindu nationalist party has managed to lead a government, its ideological push finding less acceptance in that part of the country than in Mr. Modi’s stronghold of northern India.

With a majority of the votes counted, the Congress party was projected to win at least 135 of the assembly’s 224 seats, which would position it to easily form the government.

In the final stretches of the campaign for the state, which saw a strong voter turnout of about 73 percent, Mr. Modi personally thrust himself into the race. He held about 20 rallies there, including several in which supporters showered him with flower petals as he drove past in an open car.

Making the election about the popular Mr. Modi was a last-ditch effort, after the party’s usual efforts to polarize the electorate along religious lines — such as with a ban on Muslim girls wearing head coverings as part of their school uniforms — did not seem to be deflecting voter attention from allegations of local corruption among B.J.P. members.