But, when Shri Lal Krishna Advani gave up this hope after the party’s second defeat last May, the BJP was left in the hands of a president who put the party out of its suffering by becoming a guillotine. If Rajnath Singh will be remembered at all by history, he will be remembered as the BJP’s executioner. Whoever appointed this mediocre, provincial politician to such high office could not have anticipated this hidden talent.

In recent months after Shri Advani went into semi-retirement, the BJP president did extraordinary damage to the party’s already crumbling structure. He dismissed regional leaders with proven abilities, promoted scum, took reckless decisions, permitted high corruption and took not one step that brought the BJP closer to revival or hope. There are now so many crooks in the upper echelons of the BJP that Delhi abounds with stories of a commercial transaction over the Haryana election. According to the political grapevine the BJP resorted to match-fixing to lose in Haryana so that the business interests of some important people would not be hurt by a change in government.

If corruption was the BJP’s only problem, there might still be hope. Corruption, as Indira Gandhi so memorably said, is a global phenomenon. It certainly is an Indian one. Most political parties these days are filled with young heirs whose main reason for entering ‘public life’ is to make easy money. There is no easier way to make pots and pots of ill-gotten money in India than to enter politics. So, if BJP officials are enthusiastically lining their pockets, it should not be held against them. Speaking of which, I tried to find out what happened to the Rs 2 crore that mysteriously disappeared from party coffers last December and discovered only that the matter has been hushed up. But, if a political party can be so casual about the loss of such a large amount of cash it gives us an itsy-bitsy glimpse of just how much money has been made by party officials.

The BJP’s demise has not been brought on by corruption but by serious political ineptitude. After the defeat in Maharashtra, party officials clutched haplessly at the Raj Thackeray straw. They went endlessly on to endless TV shows to say that 42 constituencies were affected by Raj Thackeray’s ability to arouse Marathi chauvinism. What they appear to have not noticed is that Thackeray did as well as he did because he succeeded in projecting himself as the only opposition leader in Maharashtra. He mocked the Congress and the Nationalist Congress Party leaders for not being able to provide electricity and clean water even in their own constituencies. He pointed out that in ten years of rule, the government had been unable to improve living standards in Mumbai or Maharashtra. Not a single BJP leader was able to do this because in Maharashtra there is nobody in the BJP to whom the word leader could even loosely apply. As for Arunachal Pradesh, if there is ever a real ‘chintan baithak’ the BJP’s senior leaders need to ask why Kiran Riiju left them for the Congress Party. He is young, bright, very political and every inch the sort of man that Indian politics desperately needs. Why did he leave?

So then? What happens now? I agree with Arun Shourie when he says that the need of the hour is to bomb the headquarters. But, when he suggested in his interview to The Indian Express editor-in-chief Shekhar Gupta that the only hope was for the Rashtriya Swayamsewak Sangh to take the party over, I nearly fainted with horror. This is not a solution. It is the kiss of death. The RSS has not had a new idea since the 1930 when it made the weird couture decision to dress its rank and file in khaki knickers. Not a single RSS leader has a political idea worth discussing and on the cultural front they need to begin by first learning the fundamentals of Indian culture. Forget so big an idea. What about just committing its khaki knickers cadre to cleaning the Ganga and the Yamuna?

What the BJP needs is to reincarnate itself into a proper political party with inner party democracy, discussion and debate. At the moment it is no more than a poor imitation of the Congress Party. And, who in their right mind will vote for that?