PTI

New Delhi, Jun 20: BJP President Rajnath Singh on Saturday took responsibility for the party's Lok Sabha debacle but ruled out distancing itself from Hindutva ideology.

Asserting that it was not a national defeat for the party as the results varied from state to state, he said there was no questioning of holding an individual accountable for the debacle.

"We can't hold one person accountable for failure and the review of the defeat is an ongoing process. BJP believes in collective success and collective failure," Singh said in his inaugural address to the two-day National Executive that began today.

He said if one person has to take the blame "I am taking responsibility".

This is the first major gathering of the party leaders to discuss the electoral failure.

Singh said that the poll outcome showed that the country was proceeding towards a bi-polar polity and defended the issues of Hindutva raised in the election campaign.

"We do not regret the issues we have raised. These issues whether communal reservation, communal budgeting or soft approach to terrorism was all in national interest," Singh said.

Singh talked about "national justice" and said the elections were not a referendum on cultural nationalism or Hindutva.

Singh said that Hindutva was an eternal and geo-political concept but the party could not articulate it properly.

With voices of dissent emerging on the party for fixing responsibility for the poll debacle, Singh said that both in victory and defeat, the party believes in "collective responsibility".

Noting that right wing space has never been vacated in the country, the BJP President said, "in ushering a change, the politics of right has always played a very crucial role".

On the right wing space, Singh said BJP must be seen in contrast with the Congress and "any confusion will be politically detrimental".

Singh has asked the party colleagues to give their suggestions in writing which will be discussed threadbare in the chintan baithak (brain storming session) of the BJP which will be held soon.

"We need to articulate (Hindutva) in the contemporary idiom," party spokesman Ravi Shankar Prasad said, quoting Singh as saying in the meeting.

Asked about a feeling in the party that Varun Gandhi's hate speeches cost the party in the elections, Prasad said BJP believed in the ideology propounded by Shyama Prasad Mukherjee and Deen Dayal Upadhyay, who had set the principle of "justice to all and appeasement of none."

Replying to a question at the press conference, Prasad said Hindutva is "liberal" and "tolerant".

"As far as ideology of Hindutva is concerned, it is liberal, not conservative, and tolerant. When some people say we must leave it, we do not accept," he said.

Further explaining, he said, "This is the concept of Hindutva handed over by Shyama Prasad Mukherjee, Deen Dayal Upadhaya and others. It means justice to all, appeasement to none, tolerant, supporting coexistence, talking of a larger view of cultural civilisation as ethos of India."

Prasad said that his party has always stuck to the ideology of Hindutva and condemned the riots in Gujarat and the attack on women at a pub in Mangalore.