Former Prime Minister V. P. Singh, deriding the Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party in an April 1991 campaign speech, said, “Who are you to give us Ram? He belongs to all of us. Have you become Ram's sole agent? Have you made him a party member?” V. P. Singh put his finger on the strategic nature of the Hindutva program, and the extent to which it was an advantage that belonged to the first-comer. Once this advantage had been seized, however, it changed the context for other political parties. Opposed as V. P. Singh may have been to the BJP, he could only argue that other parties too could claim Ram. If he protested against the BJP's presumption in “giving” Ram to the people, this only registered that the identification between deity and party had succeeded, at some level.

I have suggested that the growth of Hindu nationalism took place at a specific historical moment: the hiatus between a long period of Indian National Congress hegemony and an emerging dispensation characterized by the importance of the non-committed vote, and a newly salient “split public.” There was the expectation that a “national party,” one with a more or less countrywide base, would succeed the Congress. As a political party, the BJP had arisen in the shadow of the Congress Party, and for a long time had accepted its marginal role in Indian politics.