NEW DELHI, 15 May 2004 — Shocked by its defeat in elections, India’s Hindu fundamentalist Bharatiya Janata Party said yesterday that it had failed to read the pulse of the people and may have overestimated the feel-good factor in the country.
But the party said it would continue to pursue an agenda of development and good governance and would not revert to the hard-line Hindu themes which first catapulted the BJP to political center stage.
Analysts said the BJP had acquired an image as a party of the urban rich — people who owned fancy cars, mobile phones, splurged at shopping malls and could afford to borrow huge sums of money from banks to buy apartments.
And that apparently was its biggest undoing, as millions of rural poor who felt left out voted against the government in the marathon five stage election which ended this week.
The BJP-led coalition of Prime Minister Atal Behari Vajpayee was swept out by the opposition party Congress, headed by Italian-born Sonia Gandhi, despite surveys which initially gave the BJP an easy win and later predicted an inconclusive verdict.
The BJP called early elections in a bid to capitalize on a booming economy, bumper crops, low interest rates and prospects of peace with Pakistan — a package which the party sold to voters through a campaign entitled “India Shining”.
“All our assessments have gone wrong, sir,” BJP President Venkaiah Naidu told a news conference, a day after votes were counted in the world’s largest exercise in democracy.
Asked if India was not shining as much as the coalition thought, Naidu said: “It was not as much. Otherwise we would have got a majority. But is that the only factor or are there other factors is something we have to analyse. The development agenda that we took is our agenda and we will pursue it.”
Naidu was speaking after a post-mortem by the party’s top leadership of the stunning election defeat.
The BJP reiterated yesterday they opposed Sonia Gandhi becoming prime minister, even though opposition to her foreign roots failed to resonate with voters.
“We are not opposed to Sonia Gandhi as an individual,” said Naidu. “But we are clear about one thing — the prime minister, president, vice president and other high offices in the country should be held by people of Indian origin.”
Sonia, 57, was born Sonia Maino near Turin and in 1968 married Rajiv Gandhi, scion of India’s political first family. She acquired Indian nationality in 1984 and her husband was assassinated in 1991.
