Following the Bharatiya Janata Party's electoral successes in Gujarat and Himachal Pradesh during the recent assembly polls, India's national press seems intent on trying to impress upon its readership that the BJP-led National Democratic Alliance (NDA) is on the comeback trail. That certainly seems to fit in with the party's own public-relations attempts; at this point, it is important explore whether what is being fed to the readership appears to add up to anything. Ultimately, it does not, given the fact that there are limits to voting success when the focus is not on economic or social welfare, but communalist division as a means of electoral advancement. Meanwhile, the BJP's allies seem to have added this factor to their calculations, which has led to their distance.
In recent months, L K Advani, the BJP's newly anointed candidate for prime minister, has been hectically trying to galvanise the party with a pledge to bring the BJP to victory in the Lok Sabha polls, currently scheduled for May 2009. Advani is currently on a campaign, heavily flavoured with Hindutva ingredients, that is now crisscrossing the whole of India. After the BJP's National Council endorsed his prime-ministerial candidature last December, in his first speech, at Jabalpur, he described "Jihadi terrorism" as one of "the biggest threats facing the country". Inherent in this is an idea on which increasingly heavy emphasis will be placed as the campaign gets underway: that Hindus are under threat from Muslims, and that only the BJP can 'save' them.
During the 1999 parliamentary elections, one of the major factors behind the BJP's win of 182 seats was the alliances it was able to forge with parties such as the Telugu Desam, Shiv Sena, Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam (DMK) and so on. During the subsequent polls, in 2004, the BJP's strength was reduced to 138 seats, following the desertion of such several allies. Moreover, out of those 138 seats, the BJP retained just 90 of those it had won in 1999.
Of the Lok Sabha's 543 constituencies, BJP party bosses have identified 297 where the party is currently in play, many of which so regarded due to years of communal tension. These assumptions also have precedent, as these 297 seats were taken from a list of constituencies where the BJP has won at least once since 1989. The hoped-for numbers would certainly signal a rise from the party's current 138 seats in the Lok Sabha, and would be significant against the backdrop of the party's slide in recent years. While the BJP's national vote share rose from 11 percent in 1989 to 25 percent in 1998, it dropped to 22 percent during the 2004 Lok Sabha polls. But in the current context, even those numbers look largely unattainable.