Brajesh Mishra: ...or Deve Gowda or so and so, and they had no confidence in it.

•Shekhar Gupta: In fact they were paranoid.

Brajesh Mishra: They were worried that what will happen because they have had experience of this in 1989, 1990. You remember VP Singh and Charan Singh et cetera and then Deve Gowda and Mr Gujral, and the situation wasn’t very good. So they saw stability in the country when Mr Vajpayee became Prime Minister and remained so for six years and they saw stability when the Congress took over and Manmohan Singh became Prime Minister. It’s a stable situation moving forward. Of course, problems here and there. So they were not ready to accept a situation where, you know a group of parties getting together ...

•Shekhar Gupta: ...And then deciding the Prime Minister

Brajesh Mishra: This was not acceptable to them. The second reason was, in my view, that the campaign of the BJP was a negative campaign. Congress is weak, they haven’t done this, they haven’t ..., the internal security problem, terrorism problem, they have failed in all this, that kind of .... which did not go down well with the electorate. Because, obviously the other side was going to say, well, when you were in power you also had these terrorist incidents and what did you do at that time? So this negativeness of the campaign...

•Shekhar Gupta: and the third?

Brajesh Mishra: This negativeness was not accepted. And the third was the impression given during the campaign through the voices of Varun Gandhi and Narendra Modi of a very strident Hindutva which excluded everybody else, all other communities. Now Shekhar, perhaps you have heard me say this earlier that Hindu ethos does not go allow people to go beyond a limit. In Hindi, it is called Atti.

... contd.