One of Ours

...Just hours after the Bharatiya Janata Party lost power last Thursday to the left-leaning Congress Party, BJP leaders came under harsh criticism, most of it coming from the Hindu nationalist party's staunchest supporters. The focus of their attacks was the BJP's 79-year-old popular prime minister, Atal Bihari Vajpayee, who they claimed diluted the BJP's core values.

Over the past five years, the BJP under Mr. Vajpayee's leadership won plaudits, both in India and abroad, for speeding up the pace of economic reform and cutting back on India's stifling government bureaucracy and regulations. But by focusing on economics, at the expense of social issues - such as rewriting the Constitution to reflect Hindu values, and removing special privileges for minorities - the BJP has angered a half-dozen social organizations that make up its core base of support. Now, these activists want their party back.

"The BJP has deviated from the path of Lord Ram [a Hindu god] and adopted that of Ravana [the mythical demon that Ram slew]," said Praveen Togadia, leader of the Vishwa Hindu Parishad, a militant Hindu social organization that supports the BJP. "Hindus have taught the BJP a lesson."

...In fact, in a sign that Hindu nationalism may be on the wane, voters seemed fatigued with identity politics. The BJP fared poorly in regions most affected by the violent controversies surrounding the Hindu nationalists' struggle to unite their brethren around a sense that India is first and foremost a Hindu nation.

[...]

...if the elections are a gauge of public opinion, it seems that resolving the Ayodhya dispute was not foremost in their minds. The BJP parliamentarian in Ayodhya was voted out of office. The BJP also lost seats in the temple towns of Kashi and Mathura, where activists have also pledged to tear down mosques.

The BJP also did badly in the state of Gujarat, ruled by the BJP hard-liner Narendra Modi, where Hindu rioters killed nearly 1,000 Muslims...For political watchers, it's a sign that Hindu voters have rejected extremism.

"The Hindus with their feet voted the BJP out in Gujarat," says Saeed Naqvi, a senior political analyst in New Delhi. For most voters, economic matters rather than social ones, were the most important question of this election, and not enough of the vast majority of poor Indians felt the effects of the BJP's pro-business, economic policies. "There is a fundamental sanity, a certain balance in the Hindu mind that rejects this sort of extremism. And in the very areas where the riots took place, the Hindu voters voted the BJP out."