The BJP may not see too many silver linings in its electoral defeat, but it may like to note that it still has marginally more MPs in the 15th Lok Sabha (116) than the Congress had in the 13th (114). And just as critics then wrote off the Congress as a political force for the near future, critics will now write off the BJP. It took the Congress only five years from that lowest point to recapture power at the Centre and an additional five to cross the 200 mark on its own. Yet, the work for the beleaguered BJP on its comeback trail may be harder than it was for the Congress. For one, by the time the next general election comes along, the BJP will have been out of power for 10 long years, a period long enough to drain

a party of its most important resources — money and people.

Also, for the BJP, the defeat in 2009 will be harder to digest and rationalise than the defeat in 2004 — the easy explanation then was anti-incumbency (NDA had won two general elections and spent six years in power). And the party ended up only seven seats behind the Congress, hardly an emphatic loss. This time round, the party has ended up 90 seats short of the Congress, a devastating result against an incumbent government it viewed as weak and incompetent. Clearly then, the party has at some point lost the pulse of the electorate. However, the BJP’s internal interpretation of how the party must respond is likely to be quite different from the liberal intelligentsia’s view which necessitates the conversion of the BJP into a moderate (Hindutva abandoned) party of the centre-right. Influential parts of the BJP and RSS may argue that being the liberal B-team of the Congress isn’t going to win the party support from either its core base or independent voters.

... contd.