LONDON: India's general election saw the first major reversal in 20 years for the Bharatiya Janata party and the forces of the Hindu right. But no sooner had the advocates of "Hindu rashtra" lost at the polls than they launched a strident campaign to alter the result.

They declared that they would not accept the foreign- born Sonia Gandhi, heir to the Nehru-Gandhi legacy and leader of the victorious Congress party, as prime minister. On Tuesday, following days of personal attacks by BJP leaders, she withdrew, handing the prime ministership to her Congress ally, Manmohan Singh.

The BJP spent years making an issue of Ms Gandhi's foreign origins. It was an unrelenting motif in their campaign for re- election. But, as an editorial in the Hindu observed, "in no democracy are losers in an election entitled to overrule the umpire on who won and who lost".

The boundaries of national identity have always been a preoccupation of the Hindu right. While in office the BJP promoted an interpretation of Indian history predicated on the distinction between indigenous and alien.

It was claimed (in defiance of scholarly opinion) that the Vedas, the Indo-European language and the "Aryans" (perceived as ancestors of today's upper-caste Hindus) were all of Indian origin.

In the name of instilling "national self-confidence", schools were exhorted to celebrate the greatness of a largely imaginary ancient India. Blame for subsequent decline was then assigned to allegedly non- indigenous forces.

In its drive to promote an exclusionary and monolithic definition of the Indian nation, the BJP and its allies made history into a political battleground.

Publications were censored, historians and authors (Indian and foreign) hounded. At an election rally in Maharashtra, the then PM, Atal Behari Vajpayee, denounced James Laine, author of a book on the 17th-century Maratha warrior king Shivaji, for allegedly defaming a national hero: "We not only condemn [the book], but also warn the foreign author not to play with our national pride."

Over the last week, BJP leaders have vied with each other in demagogic appeals to a racist, blood-and-soil nationalism. To most of the Indian public, they look like bad losers.

As for Ms Gandhi, her reluctance to assume power is widely regarded as genuine and long-established. Some will argue that she has turned the tables on the BJP, depriving them of their pretext for destabilizing an elected government.

Nonetheless, the disturbing fact remains that extra-electoral pressure was brought to bear in a flagrant attempt to subvert the will of the world's largest electorate.

In her renunciation of high office, Ms Gandhi is following a venerable Indian tradition, as her daughter Priyanka pointed out. Mahatma Gandhi never accepted an official position in the Congress party or in the government of independent India. And he frequently expressed a distaste for "the distinction between foreign and indigenous". -Dawn/The Guardian News Service.