In some of my earlier postings, I mentioned this. See the following:

Now many others have similar thoughts, including some of the insiders and some people from the Sangh Parivaar. Here is a sample.

  • Vaidya of RSS : "the BJP has failed to convey the real meaning of ‘Hindutva’ to the people (in the recent elections). Probably, they thought they were not deemed to climb the pedestal of power with ‘Hindutva’ line. Hence, BJP should now disassociate itself with ‘Hindutva’." … He said BJP mentioned ‘Hindutva’ in its election manifesto in recent Lok Sabha elections but it "miserably failed to attract" the common voters and citizens in the country".
  • Vir Sanghvi – The middle class has rejected BJP’s definition of Indianness: "…A new middle class did emerge. It did reject the Nehruvian consensus. It did embrace conspicuous consumption. And yes, it clasped the BJP to its collective bosom.   The party, which had hovered around the fringes of national politics for decades in various guises, suddenly became the party of a certain kind of educated Indian. The new BJP pandered to middle class sentiment, to middle class prejudice and to middle class grievances.   By 2002 or so, things had got to the stage where history books were being re-written, where Jawaharlal Nehru was being routinely derided as the man responsible for India’s poverty, and where L.K. Advani could confidently proclaim that the BJP was now the natural party of governance.   And yet, just seven years later, the party seems to be over. …

    what happened to the new middle class and its affinity with the BJP? Over the last five years, prosperity has actually increased. And yet, the rejection of the Nehruvian consensus has tapered off. Nor do the issues that once defined the new middle class now seem to matter that much.

       We see this most clearly in the change in the middle class approach to the Hindu-Muslim issue. In the 1980s, the BJP built on Hindu anger. It said that Hindus had been humiliated by Sikhs in the Punjab. Now, they were faced with fanatical Muslims who refused to return the sacred birthplace of Ram, preferring to protect a mosque that was itself a symbol of Hindu humiliation. Worst of all, the secular Congress was backing Muslims against Hindus. … 

    Because that approach worked for so many years, the BJP tried a variation at this election. Hindus were being attacked by Muslim terrorists. These terrorists could easily be locked up but the Congress refused to re-impose POTA for fear of losing Muslim votes. But this time, the middle class paid no attention. And as for the whole Ayodhya issue, middle class voters seemed embarrassed that in the 21st century they should be asked to debate India’s future on the basis of a dispute over a medieval mosque.

       We see the change in the way the middle class has rejected the BJP’s definition of Indianness. In 2004, Sushma Swaraj was able to go on TV to declare that she would shave her head in protest if a foreigner became Prime Minister. Now, nobody cares about the foreign origin issue. When you watch TV footage of Sushma’s outburst today, she just seems silly and overwrought.  So it is with ‘Indian culture’. The last BJP government demanded that DD newsreaders increase the sleeve-lengths of their blouses and routinely denounced MTV. Throughout the BJP’s term in office, cinema halls were regularly attacked and film shootings disrupted on the grounds that Indian culture was being undermined.

       Now, when the Ram Sene attacks women for going to pubs or the lunatic fringe of the Parivar tries to disrupt Valentine’s Day, the protests come from the entire middle class. Nor are the attacks on cinema halland film crews that common. For instance, Deepa Mehta could easily shoot Water in today’s India. …

    Nowhere is the transformation clearer than in the attitude to Narendra Modi. I accept that most middle-class people do not necessarily regard him as a mass murderer in the way that I do. But equally, you cannot deny that his brand of hate-filled demagoguery makes the middle class nervous.

     People want stability even more than they want development. They do not want the politics of hate and communal tension. And at some level, they are embarrassed by the way the world looks at us after the Gujarat riots and by Modi’s pariah status in many Western countries.   What’s made the difference? Here’s my theory. I reckon that the middle class today is more homogenous and more mature than it was even five years ago. The new middle class has lost its sense of grievance; it has lost the outsider’s desire to overturn the ruling consensus; and it has gone past the issues on which the BJP’s appeal is based.

  • Sudheendra Kulkarni in Tehelka: "… Why did the BJP invite this weakness upon itself? The reason has to do with the widespread ideological confusion within the party over what the BJP’s advocacy of Hindutva actually means. The confusion has persisted for a long time, but it intensified after the defeat of the BJP/NDA in 2004. There was a strong view within a section of the party — and a much stronger and almost unanimous view within the larger Sangh Parivar — that the Vajpayee’s government was defeated because the BJP had “abandoned Hindutva”. The argument went like this: “In its bid to form the NDA government, the BJP kept aside its core ideological commitments on the construction of the Ram Temple in Ayodhya, the abrogation of Article 370 and the Uniform Civil Code. The Hindu voters, who had enabled the BJP to emerge as a strong force in Indian politics in the late 1980s and 1990s, felt let down by this. In 2004, the BJP again kept the Hindutva issues in cold storage and made development its main plank. This further disillusioned the Hindu voters. Their indifference led to the party’s defeat in 2004.” In the aftermath of the setback in 2009, many angry voices have again blamed the party leadership, Advani in particular, for the same reason — “You lost because you abandoned Hindutva.” t’s a deeply flawed view. It errs in believing that the BJP’s Hindu base is synonymous with the totality of Hindu voters. The fact is, Hindus never vote as a block for any particular party. There is only a small section of Hindus who have voted as Hindus for what they perceived as a pro-Hindu party — the Jana Sangh in the past and the BJP in later years. Their number increased dramatically in the late 1980s and early 1990s due to the Ayodhya movement, which, for about ten years, caught the imagination of a large section of the Hindu society. However, the BJP’s rising strength in the late 1990s was also on account of another important factor, which had nothing “Hindu” about it: the people’s desire to give the BJP also an opportunity to govern the country. This desire was further whetted by Vajpayee’s pan-Indian popularity, as was evident from the appeal of the slogan “Sabko dekha baari baari, Ab ki baari Atal Behari”.

    If the BJP’s electoral success in 1998 and 1999 was due to factors beyond what are narrowly seen as “Hindutva” issues, subsequent events have proved beyond a shadow of doubt that the party’s Hindu base is small even within Hindu society, not to speak of the electorate as a whole. This small Hindu base on its own can never bring the party to power at the Centre. … At a broader level, it is high time the BJP seriously debated and decided what it means by ‘Hindutva’, and also what formulations of ‘Hindutva’ are not acceptable to it. True, the BJP must remain an ideology-driven party. But without clarity on what the BJP’s ideology is, the party cannot win the support of more Hindus, let alone the support of Muslims and Christians. Understood as ‘Cultural Nationalism’ in an inclusive, integrative and noncommunal sense, Hindutva indeed defines the organizing and sustaining principle of the Indian Nation. However, just as the noble principle of secularism can be perverted and practiced for politically expedient reasons — the selfstyled ‘secular’ parties have indeed done it to isolate the BJP — Hindutva is also vulnerable to narrow interpretations and bigoted practice. …

  • Pratap Bhanu Mehta – Party of little men: "… This is a real shame, because India needs a good Opposition party. It also needs a sensible conversation about many of the issues the BJP raised before it completely lost track of what it stood for. But all the recipes being proposed: the BJP should ideologically reinvent itself, it should jettison the RSS, it should be forward looking, face one obstacle. Who will bell the cat? Is there any leader amongst this lot who has the minimal credibility to take the party in any direction?"
  • Sundeep Dougal’s roundup at http://blogs.outlookindia.com/default.aspx?ddm=10&pid=1896&eid=5
  • Kingshuk Nag in Times of India.