NEW DELHI: The Hindu, right-wing Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), which heads the 27-party ruling coalition in India, has suffered a massive setback in elections to the legislatures of four Indian states.

The defeat not only signals the BJP’s serious ideological and political decline, and the severe erosion of the appeal of its ethnic-religious Hindu-nationalist platform. It could also presage trouble for its faction-torn and fraction-prone coalition in the central (federal) government headed by the prime minister, Atal Bihari Vajpayee.

The party was squarely rejected in all four states. Its vote has eroded by an estimated seven per cent or more. In Uttar Pradesh, it won only 88 seats, just half the number five years ago. Even with allies, the BJP’s tally was under one-quarter of the legislative assembly’s strength of 403.

In Punjab, where it was a junior partner of the ethnic-Sikh Akali Dal, it won, despite furious campaigning by Vajpayee and other ministers — just three seats, as against 17 in 1997. The Congress party of Sonia Gandhi trounced the Akali Dal-BJP alliance to win a majority.

In Uttaranchal, so rapid was popular disillusionment with the BJP within just a year due to its poor governance that its rival, the Congress won a majority. In Uttar Pradesh the Bahujan Samaj Party outstripped the BJP, improving its earlier vote-share by six percentage points or so.

It just will not do to claim that the BJP was punished by the voter largely because of fatigue with the ruling government — called the tanti-incumbency disadvantage in India — and not because of disenchantment with its poor governance.

Besides, the voting margin against the BJP was probably higher than the four-to-five percentage points usually claimed by anti- incumbency. In Uttar Pradesh and Uttaranchal, the BJP tried to blunt that disadvantage by changing leaders in midstream. That too did not help.

Even more important was the failure of the terrorism plank, which the Vajpayee government transformed into a major policy instrument after Sept 11 and especially after the Dec 13 attack on India’s Parliament.

BJP’s sectarian Hindu exclusivism always had a limited appeal: the BJP’s national vote never exceeded 26 per cent. But it has now taken a severe beating.

Whatever happens, the current round of state elections was a referendum on the Vajpayee leadership. They have now concluded that the BJP is in irreversible decline — it cannot possibly provide the fulcrum of a stable national government.

The political tide is clearly turning as the people look for change, away from religion-based identity politics toward something far more substantial and relevant to their needs.—Dawn/InterPress Service.