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ShareSchadenfreude is a wonderful German word -- so many of their words so wonderfully express a whole sequence of feelings rather than just one thing or the other, no wonder people use them when they want to show off.
But to feel joy in the misery of others, that is not a nice feeling, though those of us humans who have weaknesses must admit to feeling it.
But what does one make of the self-destruction of the Bharatiya Janata Party? Rubbing your hands together in childish glee is fun up to a point, but is neither productive nor sensible. In fact, the reports of the demise of the BJP, to re-quote the re-quoted ad nauseam quip from Mark Twain, are greatly exaggerated.
What has happened though is that a lot of its taken-for-granted stuff didn't work. It blustered its way through the whole election, mistook TV presence for national presence and didn't gauge the mood of the public and overused the Narendra Modi brand of aggressive, nasty politics.
There is something about this face of the BJP which only reveals its insecurities. Perhaps playing upon similar insecurities in the public mind (Hindus are under terrible threat from Muslims and also Christians, Hindus are second-class citizens in their own country and so on) worked 15 or 20 years ago, when we were a more insecure nation. But much has changed and indeed, the BJP can take credit here.
Some of the economic growth that happened after 1991 was under the NDA watch. Just because they overdid the India Shining gloating does not mean that India did not shine in those years.
But where they missed the bus in 2004 and again in 2009 was in refusing to acknowledge the problems of 2004 -- a couple of victories in assembly elections lead to some arrogance.
This comes back to their issues with perceived Hindu insecurities. The Gujarat riots of 2002 and the subsequent refusal of the party and the Gujarat chief minister to even acknowledge that the riots were unconscionable were not lost on the electorate.
This blind spot is evident in the Varun Gandhi speech issue. Whatever he said or did not say or has been accused of saying, the BJP did not lose these elections because of him. Rather, he is a symptom of what is wrong. It is very amusing that Muslims in the BJP are blaming the young Gandhi -- did they not know what hard Hindutva meant before Gandhi's speech?
Has the demolition of the "disputed structure" in Ayodhya been forgotten by the token Muslims of the BJP? Even the current hand-wringing of its "rebels" seems fake.
I cannot speculate on the question of hard and soft Hindutva, what they are and how the BJP should choose between them. But this much seems clear -- the country has moved on from all that hate politics. The BJP states where governance was good and perceived to be so, showed good results for them.
The states where hate or personality politics was used showed them up. If Narendra Modi's name is mentioned too often, then he is given victim status and the hysterical defence of his doings begins. But Modi did not prove to be the BJP's big winner and the prime ministerial ambitions have gone poof for a bit.
Fact is, the BJP does not have 100 per cent vote share in Gujarat, though it has higher decibel powers. Gujarat was used as a pilot state in the Hindutva experiment. Yet, how successful has the hardline experiment been in other states? Did it work in Karnataka? Were the young enthused by the Ram Sene's antics? Did it work in Orissa? Was the country happy about the attacks on tribals and Christians?
The excuse that these were not direct results of BJP politics does not wash, because they came from organisations which alldrink from the same fount as the BJP. The party perhaps has to realise that all emotive issues have a limited shelf-life. Now what it is going to do with that knowledge I cannot say. But a little compassion written into its DNA will not hurt.
