The embattled president of the Bharatiya Janata Party, Rajnath Singh, has never been known for choosing his words with care. But, at his best, he has a certain bluntness which is useful — useful in that, without evasion or circumlocution, it tells us exactly how the BJP is going wrong. His most recent statement, at a ceremony felicitating Madhya Pradesh partyman Kailash Narayan Sarang in Bhopal, is exemplary. A law, he said, was necessary to “check” large-scale religious conversion. (A law that he seemed to think would “give freedom to people to choose their religion”, which adds an inability with simple logic to Singh’s many virtues.)

Rajnath Singh might think that fanning the flames of paranoia about a Hinduism under siege might make for good politics. That, for him, might be the lessons of the ’90s. But that has been tried ad infinitum recently — and it doesn’t work any more. (Remember how the Amarnath land agitation was to be a nationwide stir? And help win the general election for the BJP?) Instead of retreating to that past, the BJP must look forward.

More, with every such illiberal pronouncement, the BJP declares itself ever more unready to recover the mantle of being a truly modern party of government. Whatever the genuineness of concerns about how delicate social structures in parts of India that have been unchanged for centuries are being put under pressure by religious activity of one sort or another, there is little that a liberal state can do about it. And if it were to, how short a step is it from interdicting individuals’ religious activity that is considered dangerous to social cohesion to clamping down on economic or political activity that does the same? These are questions that any responsible party must ask before proposing constitutional changes. But once again the BJP’s leadership has failed the most basic tests — for common sense, and for a liberal sensibility. Let these be the last few months that Rajnath Singh, in particular, is the standard-bearer of India’s largest opposition party. The longer he stays so, the more he diminishes us all.