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NEW DELHI, India—India’s pro-Hindu ruling party is feeling good. 

The country’s economy has soared in the last year, and as voters consider their choices for national elections beginning next month, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) is casting itself as the sole architect of a surging India. 

“Top of the world,” says smiling BJP official B.D. Misra, describing the mood at the party’s central office. The economy is blazing, he says, and the BJP deserves “200 percent” credit. 

On the path to the polls, the BJP is riding a very different beast than the one that carried it to power five years ago. Back then it sought votes by slandering the country’s minority Muslims. Now it’s riding on outsourcing. 

U.S. and British multinationals have moved a torrent of information technology (IT) jobs to India. Outsourced services, like call centers and accounting, grew by a remarkable 59 percent in India last year and are likely to continue at that pace. 

Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee began draping full-page ads in major newspapers in January. They show gleeful Indians clutching pink lotus flowers, playing cricket and raising hands in a classroom, beneath the words “India Shining.” 

But many worry that the party’s success will re-energize its communal roots. 

When the BJP came to power, most agreed that it would have to moderate its pro-Hindu agenda and take a more benign attitude toward India’s fantastically diverse citizenry of 1 billion people, a quarter of whom still live in poverty. The BJP has tried to temper its anti-Muslim stance. But there are signs they may abandon that effort. 

“They are trying to recreate a sense of polarization in the country,” says Zafarul-Islam Khan, editor of the research journal Muslim India. The message, he says, is “only the BJP will protect the aspirations of Hindus.” 

Further, a pre-election redraft of the party’s official goals will raise four of the Hindu far-right’s top projects: banning cow slaughter, removing special legal status for Muslims on issues like divorce and inheritance, erecting a temple to the Hindu god Ram on the remains of the Babri Mosque and rescinding Muslim majority Kashmir’s autonomous status. 

The BJP has learned in recent years that it can get away with isolating Muslims, which constitute only 14 percent of the population. 

Two years ago, 1,000 Muslims were killed by their Hindu neighbors in the western state of Gujarat. At the time, many predicted that the BJP, which was implicated by human rights groups in sponsoring the violence, would be fatally tarnished. 

The party failed to rebuke the hawkish state leader Narendra Modi, a BJP member, despite his public description of the massacre as “natural” and his resistance to opening camps for Muslim survivors on the grounds that they would become “baby-producing centers.” Moreover, in two years since the riots, not a single killer has been convicted. 

But the BJP appears to be unscathed. In fact, it has in recent weeks attracted a spate of political defectors, including some prominent Muslims. 

Najma Heptullah, a senior Congress member of 24 years and a Muslim, appears set to join the BJP. The betrayal has drawn scorn from Congress President Sonia Gandhi, who called her an “opportunist.” 

Yet, a queue appears to be forming. Kolkata’s daily newspaper Telegraph recently asked in an article, “Who’s Next?” It listed 10 new Congress members rumored to be planning shifts to the BJP. 

“Wherever they see a chance to get votes, they go there,” Congress leader Kabil Sibal says of the defectors. 

The Hindu defections are blamed on a failing Congress party. “Many people simply believe that in the battle with China for economic dominance, the BJP and not Congress have the ability and determination,” says Darren Zook, a South Asia expert at the University of California at Berkeley. 

In a report released last month, the U.S. State Department repeated its concern that India was falling prey to Hindu extremist forces, calling its democracy “long-standing but flawed.” With the continuing flood of jobs here from U.S. corporations, though, there may be little to hold the resurging BJP back. 

Mike McPhate is a reporter at the Indian Express, an English daily. He is based in New Delhi.