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15 May 2004
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Saturday
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24 Rabi-ul-Awwal 1425
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BJP admits it got it all wrong: Sonia as PM opposed
NEW DELHI, May 14: Shocked by its defeat in elections, the Bharatiya Janata Party said on Friday that it had failed to read the pulse of the people and may have overestimated the feel-good factor in the country.
But the party said it would continue to pursue an agenda of development and good governance and would not revert to the hard-line Hindu themes that first catapulted the BJP to political centre stage.
The BJP reiterated it still opposed Sonia Gandhi becoming prime minister, even though opposition to her foreign roots failed to resonate with voters.
"We are not opposed to Sonia Gandhi as an individual," said Venkaiah Naidu, president of outgoing prime minister Atal Behari Vajpayee's Bharatiya Janata Party. "But we are clear about one thing - the prime minister, president, vice president and other high offices in the country should be held by people of Indian origin," Naidu said.
The BJP called early elections in a bid to capitalize on a booming economy, bumper crops, low interest rates and prospects of peace with Pakistan - a package that the party sold to voters through a campaign entitled "India Shining".
"All our assessments have gone wrong, sir," BJP president Venkaiah Naidu told a news conference.
Asked if India was not shining as much as the coalition thought, Mr Naidu said: "It was not as much. Otherwise we would have got a majority. But is that the only factor or are there other factors is something we have to analyse.
"The development agenda that we took is our agenda and we will pursue it."
Mr Naidu was speaking after a post-mortem by the party's top leadership of the stunning election defeat. The BJP and its allies won 185 seats in the 545-member parliament, down 90 seats from the last elections in 1999.
"These results were not expected by anybody in the country. Not by political people, not by the media, not by our opponents and not by our supporters," Mr Naidu said.
The BJP's campaign foundered on the failure of growth and cheap loans to reach the hundreds of millions in crushing poverty in rural India - where power, jobs and clean water still remain luxuries.-Reuters
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