Over so many years of watching the political scene, you may have seen L.K. Advani in victory and defeat, joy and melancholy, anger and generosity, but never lost for ideas, forlorn, as he looked in Parliament this week. His was a case of a top quality lawyer dumped with a bad case, and a worse script to defend it. For the BJP’s tallest leader it was tough enough to build a case against the nuclear deal, given that his party and its constituency have championed unabashed strategic engagement with the United States for five decades now. It is tough to bring out passion when there isn’t reason or conviction to match, so don’t just blame his speech-writers. And for decades I haven’t known Advani to have the talent to fake it. He takes it on the chin, which is one of his great qualities and it makes him such a substantive politician, and also such an interesting one, articulate, speaking his mind, never ducking an inconvenient question. That is why so many of us in the media, even those who may not necessarily be his voters, have learnt to admire him over the decades. So why did he look so unlike himself, drifting along, not in control over this week?

This dirty little Lok Sabha session is now over. Being a reflective, introspective man, you’d expect Advani to try and figure where it all went wrong. His partymen would tell him with fake bravado that the cash-for-votes sting has tainted the UPA’s victory and turned the tables on them entirely. That in any case, this session and the politics that will now follow are about fighting the next general election. And, to that extent, the general air of corruption and wheeling-dealing, the UPA’s embrace of Mulayam Singh and Amar Singh and the compromises — like the induction of Shibu Soren in the cabinet — will all make this victory short-lived. Mayawati as the rallying point of the third front, they will argue, can devastate the Congress nationally and, on balance, this confidence vote victory may lose the Congress the next election. There is some merit in this. But Advani has seen too much in his six-decade public life to get so dazzled by this talk as to miss the big, not-so-pretty picture.

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