The single most important reason for the sad state that our major opposition party finds itself in is a very old man who cannot believe that he has lost his last chance to become Prime Minister of India. So obsessed has Shri Lal Krishna Advani been with this impossible dream that after the BJP lost power in 2004, he seems to have done nothing more than sit at home, surrounded by fawning friends and family, and dream of 7 Racecourse Road. The BJP did not lose badly in the 2004 general election. It was defeated on account of choosing the wrong allies and because nobody expected Chandrababu Naidu to do so badly in Andhra. If Shri Advani had not been so self-absorbed, he would have spent the five years between that general election and the one just gone by building up the party and finding the right issues to take to the people.

Manmohan Singh’s first government provided enough ammunition. Jihadi terrorism and the Government of India’s namby-pamby response should have been enough to propel aggressive Hindutva back to the forefront. Then, there was the international credit crunch and its effect on the Indian economy, but Mr Advani appears to have been too self-absorbed to tackle these issues in a manner that would appeal to the average voter. And, everything depended on him since the BJP President, Shri Rajnath Singh, has never grown into a national leader. If he has opinions on national issues, nobody cares to hear them.

Victory in the last election was in the hands of Shri Advani and his small coterie of advisers and they failed hopelessly. They gauged neither the mood of the people nor the party’s organisational weaknesses, of which the most obvious was the manner in which the RSS cadres had changed. Instead of helping BJP candidates win as they had in the past, the RSS became more interested in positioning its own men, many of whom were corrupt and unelectable.

In any case the BJP lost and Advani’s chances of becoming Prime Minister are now forever gone. But, after hanging on to his old job as Leader of the Opposition, he now seems determined to destroy the party completely before he retires. So instead of accountability and introspection at the top, there have been constant attempts to find scapegoats. Vasundhara Raje became last week’s scapegoat but refused to go without a fight, so we had the spectacle of BJP MLAs travelling to Delhi to prove that the former chief minister still had their support. Isn’t it up to them to elect their leader in the Assembly? Or has the BJP stopped believing in democracy? If the BJP wants to prevent its certain demise, it should concentrate on becoming more democratic, not less. One way is to hold primaries, in the American way, so that if there are worthy men hidden in its lower rungs, they can come to the top. At the moment the party seems to have been hijacked by people who would find it hard to get elected themselves, leave alone win a state.

Meanwhile, the RSS finds itself bereft of ideology and direction now that the average Indian voter has lost interest in Hindutva. The RSS should go back to being the ‘cultural organisation’ it professes to be, but its record shows that it has always mixed culture up with religion and this will get it nowhere because nobody is interested in building that temple to Rama in Ayodhya. Does the RSS have anything else to offer? Not in the area of ‘culture’ but much by way of hatred and violence through the Vishwa Hindu Parishad and the even more repellent Bajrang Dal.

The BJP, if it wants to reinvent itself, will have to distance itself from organisations of this kind. It will have to find itself some credible leaders who are under the age of 60 and it will have to come up with ideas and policies that are different from those that the Congress Party offers. Can this happen before the next general election? Not if its present leaders remain in place and not if all they can come up with is yet another Chintan Baithak to which not a single dissident has been invited. Now that really is something to worry about.