Venkaiah Naidu: The politics of the country today is not inspiring people. Ideology is being diluted, ideal behaviour does not have enough value, commitment to a particular party is seen as a weakness and ethics are being lowered. People talk about politics, think about it, debate and discuss it and disperse—in the end, they don’t do anything about it. Secondly, religion, caste and region are dominating the country’s politics which is not in the larger interest of the nation. Thirdly, opportunism is becoming the order of the day. These three things are bad for the country. Also, well-educated people are not participating in politics or casting their vote. This is affecting our system. And then there’s the media: the media is more interested in scandals, in trying to find something new rather than focusing on development, on constructive work. This is my grievance. You create a ruckus in Parliament and the next day it will be in the papers; you make a serious speech and it will be ignored.

This election is the second setback we have had. The first setback was in 2004. We had thought the NDA had done exceedingly well compared to other governments. Vajpayeeji’s government made the biggest contribution to this country’s political development map by providing linkages: air connectivity, highway connectivity, rural connectivity, rail connectivity, television connectivity, port connectivity, even political connectivity. In spite of that, we lost. This time we thought there was great unhappiness with the government, its performance and that we would be the beneficiaries because we had worked hard. But that did not happen. We lost and we humbly respect the verdict. We have the patience to sit in the Opposition for another five years, await the next opportunity. We will soon be meeting and will discuss in depth the party’s performance, the reasons for the setbacks, the shortcomings, etc.

•Monojit Majumdar: Some preliminary assessments must have been made. What went wrong?

I don’t attribute the defeat to a single reason. While there is no uniformity in the results throughout the country, one trend that was uniform was that the minorities shifted to Congress/UPA. Also, while we tried to set out an agenda before the people, there was a sustained campaign by a section of the media to shift the focus to other issues and that confused the public.

For example, the BJP’s manifesto is one of the best ever. At public meetings, we highlighted five important issues: price rise, the agrarian crisis, terrorism, unemployment and vote bank politics. Instead, the media focus was on Sri Ram Sena with which we have no association whatsoever. Then came Kandhahar. This was debated even during the 2004 elections. After Kandhahar, it was Varun Gandhi and his speech that went on for 15 days. The BJP spokesperson clarified that Varun Gandhi’s remarks were not acceptable to the BJP, that we do not approve of what was said and that there should be an enquiry into the matter. But still, it went on. Our campaign did not get adequate attention. The fact is, we could not effectively communicate our manifesto, our earlier achievements and our strong, critical differences with the Congress.

•Monojit Majumdar: Don’t you think the best way to stop this campaign would have been to immediately condemn Varun Gandhi?

My counter question is this: is the country’s future and a political party’s agenda represented by one person who has no particular position in the party when the party itself is articulating larger issues? On the second day, my party spokesman categorically said we don’t approve of the purported speech of Varun Gandhi. What else is required?

Coomi Kapoor: Maybe you were handicapped in the elections by your prime ministerial candidate while Congress succeeded in projecting the image of the youth.•

Your question is contradictory: who is the youth—Manmohan Singh?

•Coomi Kapoor: Rahul Gandhi was Congress’s biggest campaigner and they had many more young candidates than your party. Didn’t that play a role in the BJP’s defeat?

Our prime ministerial candidate is no handicap at all. He is the best available candidate in the country in terms of his character, calibre and conduct. He has energy, he has the experience and he is in better physical condition than many of the politicians in the country.

This propaganda about Rahul Gandhi’s youth appeal, I don’t go by that. He was a campaigner during the assembly elections in Uttar Pradesh, Gujarat, Uttaranchal, Punjab and Himachal Pradesh but that didn’t help the Congress. If you go through general election results in Karnataka, Jharkhand, Bihar, Orissa, Madhya Pradesh and Gujarat, they did not go by the so-called Rahul Gandhi influence. There are many reasons for what happened: one is the performance of the state governments, another is the organisational strength of the political parties. Kerala, Tamil Nadu, Andhra Pradesh and West Bengal together account for nearly 130 seats. Here, the BJP is not a force by itself and does not have the organisational strength to convert its larger appeal into votes. People thought the BJP would not win because we are organisationally weak. In all these areas where the other fronts had considerable strength, organisationally, they made the big mistake of saying that the Third Front is the alternative and the leader will be decided later. This worked to the Congress’s advantage. People didn’t like the Third Front because they didn’t want any roadblocks for the central government. They were not happy with the disruptions during Manmohan Singh’s last government because of the Communists. Therefore, in areas where BJP is not a force and other parties are a force, Congress was the biggest beneficiary.

•Shekhar Gupta: What explains the BJP’s disaster in Uttar Pradesh?

Uttar Pradesh was a stronghold of BJP earlier. Since then, certain weaknesses have crept into our party and the caste politics of Mayawati and Mulayam Singh have gained importance. We lost UP because of our organisational weakness—that is my primary assessment. I do not attribute it to any one individual. In this country, there is another problem: one of the reasons why the focus was on Varun Gandhi is that there is a weakness for dynasty in this country. I was once asked to enumerate the Congress’s strengths. I gave three: one, the people of this country still innocently believe that the present Congress is the same Congress that brought freedom to this country; secondly, many people innocently believe that these Gandhis are related to Mahatma Gandhi; thirdly, in a democracy, dynasty in nasty, but it’s tasty to a considerable proportion of people in this country.

•Shekhar Gupta: You were fourth in the Uttar Pradesh tally. Were you shocked by the results and if so, how do you analyse the loss?

We were definitely shocked, we were hoping for a better performance. Congress overtaking the BJP really shocked us. One reason was the wholesale shift of the minority vote to the Congress, but that is not the sole reason—our own failures are also there. We must analyse and then take correctives. You can’t have a readymade response without analysing in detail and then understanding in depth what went wrong. We have to give UP priority.

D.K. Singh: One of your NDA partners, the JD (U), has questioned your decision to project Narendra Modi as the prime minister in waiting.

Narendra Modi was not projected as prime minister by anybody. At one press conference, someone asked the BJP representative if he thought Narendra Modi was prime-ministerial material, and the answer was ‘we will think about it in the future’. There was no question of discussing him as PM because Advaniji is our leader. The BJP, including Narendra Modi, agreed that Advaniji was our candidate. There is a systematic effort to condemn Narendra Modi by saying that wherever he went, we lost the elections, but in the majority of places he went, we won seats. Modi has won Gujarat hands down so I don’t think it’s fair to attribute this setback to him.

•D.K. Singh: Has Hindutva as an ideology lost its electoral appeal?

Hindutva is not a political issue, it’s a way of life. We, in the BJP, are proud of the heritage and the culture of our forefathers which is time-tested and should continue. But we have never said it is an electoral issue, we have never fought elections on the basis of Hindutva.

•Seema Chisti: Have you looked at the deeper implications of the political message in this defeat where you have lost your core vote amongst the upper castes, the urban voters?

We have to ponder very seriously why the educated or urban middle class has not voted for us. In Delhi, for instance, during the assembly elections, the public said it was happy with Sheila Dikshit but then in the national elections, the voters behaved in a similar way. We have to analyse what happened to our vote base. If the traditional support base of the BJP has been eroded, we have to find out the reasons. An impression has been doing the rounds that all is not well with the BJP and this impression might have confused our support base. We have to get back our constituency and re-work our strategy, not only by our ideology but by our ideal behaviour; there are certain instances where our image has been affected and we have to take care of that in the future as well.

•Shekhar Gupta: Do you think the BJP’s opposition to the nuclear deal affected your core voters?

The nuclear deal is only a deal for a minuscule section of the political thinking people across the country. Nowhere did the public ask about the deal.

•Shekhar Gupta: Was it worthwhile to join hands with the Left to try and bring down the government over the issue?

Perhaps we had to bring out the finer distinctions between our opposition to the nuclear deal and the approach of the Communists who are simply anti-America. We are in favour of the nuclear deal; our objection was in relation to certain clauses. But we could not articulate it in an effective manner and explain to people why BJP opposed the deal.

•Shekhar Gupta: What is the BJP’s future: is it to be a Centre-Right party or is it to be a party of Hindu nationalism?

In the 30 years of my political life, I have never been able to figure out what is left, what is right—the only thing I know is that we are neither left nor right, we are straight. The BJP is a nationalist party, the nation first, the party next, the self last—that is the thinking of the party. As for BJP’s future, even today the party is the second largest party. Ups and downs happen in elections—we have to assess the reasons and rectify them. Otherwise, we would be failing in our responsibility.

•Shekhar Gupta: Today, you have lost most of your allies. Is this not an

indictment of your party?

There are few political parties other than the Congress which have not aligned with the BJP. Even the Left parties and the BJP fought the elections together in Andhra Pradesh. The AIADMK, DMK, PMK, MDMK , Telegu Desam, National Conference—all these parties have aligned with the BJP in the past. So there are no major ideological differences. It is because of the political climate in a particular situation: if you have the strength, parties will align with you, if they think going with BJP won’t benefit them, they won’t go with us.

•D.K. Singh: Youth is the buzzword in other parties. Your party has not moved in this direction.

Much of what has happened in other parties is due to dynastic politics, not because of an emphasis on youth. In our party, Vajpayeeji and Advaniji brought in younger leaders such as Venkaiah Naidu, Arun Jaitley, Sushma Swaraj, Narendra Modi,Vasundra Raje, Ananth Kumar, Ravi Shankar Prasad and Shivraj Singh Chouhan. This is a natural process in the BJP. It is not like in other parties where somebody is brought in or elevated because he is someone’s son or daughter.

•Transcribed by Chetna Bhaskar and Reeja Jacob