Almost everyone is busy analysing the causes for a totally unexpected disaster for the BJP at the Centre. Much of the discussion and threadbare analyses in terms of how many percent voted for or against a party in a particular constituency representing certain castes or religious groups or who the youth voted for and so on will continue now for sometime.

Several questions will be raised too. Was it wrong to pre-pone the elections? Was it the arrogance of the BJP bigwigs who thought that a few Heptullahs along with Arifs and some Christians reflected that the BJP had finally become acceptable to all and sundry in the country? Was disinvestment policy or youth unemployment the reason for the rout? Or was it simply communalism?

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But the one reason that seems the most plausible for the drubbing of the BJP is offered by the RSS/VHP combine and seems completely absent in current analysis and discussions. They hold that it is the disgusted Hindus who have voted the party out for betraying the cause of Hindus and Hindutva. As one who has been unsparingly critical of the Hindutva agenda of a Hindu Rashtra for India, I endorse, though partially, the view that it is the sober and conscientious Hindus who have ousted the BJP out of power.

What never came out in all the pre-poll, opinion and exit poll discussions, where one could hear only issues like ‘India Shining’; ‘Feel-Good Factor’; ‘$117 billion foreign reserves’; ‘a bullish market’; ‘Indo-Pak Peace talks’; cricket matches (made to appear as if it was won more by the BJP team than our boys); minorities flocking to the BJP camp etc, was about the ‘Soul of India’ crying to be freed from the clutches of those hardcore Hindutvavadis, who former prime minister Atal Behari Vajpayee once rightly described as ‘‘the lunatic fringe’’.

Any Indian worth his salt, and a majority of them are genuine Hindus, has been militating at his/her guts with the anti-minority rhetoric by this fringe group. For instance, one among the many pamphlets in my possession to ridicule Christianity is titled, ‘Jesus has Satan in him while Dara Singh (accused in the Staines murders) has Bhagwan in him’. If it was only limited to rhetoric and verbal abuse the tolerant Indians would have still forgiven it, but when some of it began to get translated into incidents like the burning alive of Graham Staines and his two little sons and the rape of nuns along with more than a thousand recorded attacks on the Christian community in the last six years, or indeed when they witnessed the state-sponsored Gujarat pogrom against Muslims, the real Hindus decided to call it quits.

The BJP and the powerful media totally ignored the inclusion of genuine concerns of the minority community in their manifestoes or discussions. For example, when the BJP organised a meeting for the minorities with Vajpayee after the elections were announced at the Talkatora Stadium in Delhi, neither the PM nor the Home Minister or the BJP president ever bothered to ask or look into why no member of the minority community such as Christian, Sikh, Buddhist, Jain or Parsi was invited to the meeting?

Unfortunately for the BJP, the Muslims, except those selectively invited to show the Muslim face, learnt in a jiffy that the overture towards them was only to satiate the ever-growing appetite of the BJP for votes and was anything but genuine. While the power-hungry BJP could still be forgiven for not remembering the other minorities, the media, be it electronic or print, some of whom are working overtime for the ruling NDA, never once blinked an eyelid to ask the BJP leadership about the conspicuous absence of other minorities. While certain minority communities observed such things with an acute pain, the average Hindu, whose votes matter, watched all this with even deeper agony and aversion.

One often heard Vajpayee appealing in chaste Hindi to the Muslims, ‘Hame bhi ek mauka dekar dekhiye (give us a chance and see)’, but what everyone, including the Hindus, desperately waited but never got to hear was a promise (even if a false one) to bring the soul of India back into the country by showing the door to the Modis and Togadias.

With 138 seats in the Lok Sabha and with all the past experience of running a coalition, all is still not lost for the BJP. If it wants to get back to the centre of national politics, it needs to sincerely win the hearts of millions of secular Indians. It has to convince people through its earnest deeds that it would work towards keeping India united rather than divide it on communal lines.

Though while in power it missed an important opportunity and squandered the given mauka, to be eventually voted out by the Hindus, many occasions will come Vajpayeeji’s way, like the one at the Talkatora stadium when he could have stood up like a tall leader and proclaimed: ‘‘I am first an Indian according to the Constitution of India and then anything else, including a swayamsevak, and that we in the BJP finally decide painfully to distance ourselves from the dream of that Hindu Rashtra as defined by V D Savarkar and Guru Golwalkar, where ‘Muslims and Christians can live only as second-class citizens, seeking no privileges and demanding no rights and only as long as the sweet will of the Hindu race allows them.’’

That ideology might have been relevant for a bygone era and might have worked as Jinnah clamoured for Pakistan then or for a while after Mr L K Advani’s Rath Yatra helped demolish the Babri Masjid, but this cannot just be a lasting sentiment of the larger Indian secular tolerant population. Or how could half of the Gujaratis have disconnected with Moditva, or why are the Mathura, Kashi and Ayodhya seats lost to the BJP or indeed why are the Murli Manohar Joshis, Vinay Katiyars, Venkaiah Naidus and others licking their wounds now?

If all that is still not convincing, one needs only to look at the Jhabua constituency in Madhya Pradesh, where the Congress’s Kantilal Bhuriya led in all the five BJP assembly constituencies won barely a few months ago. All this changed drastically since the January incident of rape and murder of a girl for which the VHP/BJP, falsely accusing the church personnel, sat in dharnas outside the church for two weeks. Some Sadhvis from Gujarat descended on the Church, established more than a hundred years ago, and beat up the Catholic priests with their chappals.

And of course as the Congress begins to settle in, it needs to learn too that if it allows its leaders to play as the ‘B’ team, promoting Hindutva, ignoring the real issues affecting the country, it will be shown the door in no different terms and will be voted out of power by those Hindus who have voted it in.

In the meantime, a suggested slogan from us mortals to the BJP intelligentsia as they begin to piece together their lost fortunes and prepare for the next battle: ‘‘Real Hindus ko bhi ek mauka dekar dekhiye.’’

(Father Dominic Emmanuel is the director of the Communication and Information Bureau of the Delhi Catholic archdiocese)