The smashup of the once-mighty Congress Party is the most significant outcome of India's recent elections, which also saw the ominous but predicted rise of militant Hindu fundamentalism and the creation of the rickety multiparty coalition that is now trying to govern that feisty but troubled nation. The party of Mahatma Gandhi and Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru, the Congress led India to independence and then ruled for 45 of its first 49 years as a nation. Having created a unified, secular India under a strong, activist government, it has been replaced by a mix of leftist and provincial factions called the United Front.
The party that once represented Hindus and Muslims, high castes and low, business and labor, landlords and peasants, now satisfies none of the above. In the elections of last April and May, its candidates received only 28 percent of the votes. It won only 135 of the 543 seats in the Lok Sabha, the crucial lower house of the Indian parliament. This was a sharp drop from the 232 seats won in the previous elections. Back in 1952, in India's first general elections, Congress carried 364 of the then 489 seats in the Lok Sabha.
The party that "won" the elections and yet did not win was the Bharatiya Janata (Indian People's) Party, or BJP, which captured 160 Lok Sabha seats; its local allies took an additional 33. This is the militant Hindu party, which would end India's secular history as a nation. Its members feel that India's Muslims and Christians have been tainted by foreign religious influences and their patriotism--that of the Muslims especially--is suspect. ("Their bodies are in India, but their hearts are in Arabia," said one supporter.)
But the BJP could not win the support of enough other Lok Sabha
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