14 May 2004	Friday	23 Rabi-ul-Awwal 1425

NEW DELHI, May 13: The stunning election loss suffered on Thursday by the BJP was the price paid for their focus on the surging urban economy instead of the rural masses, analysts said.

The Bharatiya Janata Party's (BJP) "India Shining" campaign slogan touted India's blistering eight percent economic growth, proliferating mobile phones and shiny highways - a vision that jarred for the poor still struggling for food, water and electricity.

"The economic policies of BJP, which did achieve many things they had set out to achieve, alienated much of the electorate which are much too poor and marginalized to benefit from them," said political analyst Pran Chopra.

"It has cost it the support of a very large section of the population. The sympathy and concern for the hardships of the poor were not reflected in the BJP's policies," he said.

Mr Chopra said the common voter was more bothered about roads in their villages, not national highways or India's record 110 billion dollars-plus of foreign exchange reserves.

The government gambled on the election five months ahead of schedule after a strong monsoon brought a bumper harvest and amid consistently high personal ratings for Prime Minister Atal Behari Vajpayee, a 79-year-old poet. But analyst B.G Verghese said the BJP miscalculated by turning the election into a popularity contest between Mr Vajpayee and Congress chief Sonia Gandhi, who the Hindu nationalists denounced as unelectable because she was born in Italy.

"One of its main planks was Sonia Gandhi's foreign origin, which was a bogus issue, and their touting Vajpayee that he was a good guy and vote for him. It was personality oriented and it bombed," Mr Verghese said.

Instead of being a liability, Sonia Gandhi seemed to have struck a rapport with women voters, he said. "There has been a swing among women voters, the kind which Indira Gandhi had years ago," Mr Verghese said.

He said Congress gained not only by India's frequent voting waves against incumbents but because the opposition party cobbled together alliances with influential regional parties.

"Regional parties are going to play an increasingly important role over the next 20 to 30 years. They will hold the trump card as the regional factor is going to remain strong," he said.

The BJP, the first avowedly Hindu party to rule secular India, downplayed its hardline roots in the election. It was only in the final stages of the campaign that it brought to the campaign trail firebrand Narendra Modi, who rode a wave of massive Hindu sentiment to re-election in 2002 after massacres that killed 2,000 people, mostly Muslims.

The BJP's platform called for the construction of a temple over the ruins of the Babri mosque, torn down by Hindu fanatics in 1992. "They were just flogging a dead horse towards the end with the temple issue," Mr Verghese said.

He said the BJP-led coalition had also failed to capitalize on the dialogue with Pakistan launched dramatically last year by Mr Vajpayee, who said he was on a final mission to make peace in nuclear-armed South Asia.

Despite Mr Vajpayee's personal popularity, pollster Yashwant Deshmukh said the BJP lacked strong candidates in many constituencies. "It is not enough to run the government at a federal level and have a good candidate to head it if you are not focusing on the grassroots," Mr Deshmukh said. -AFP