Since the Bharatiya Janata Party’s political record in opposition in the past three years has been more inclined to the occult than ordinary politics, I am going to use metaphysical language to proffer this piece of gratuitous advice. When the party’s senior leaders gather in Bhopal today for the final moments of the national executive committee’s meeting, they should consider reincarnation as a final solution.

If you think this is an absurd suggestion, please consider the party’s behaviour since it was unexpectedly tossed out of power in May 2004. Its first reaction to the defeat was not introspection but astrology. What follows is a true story. On the day that the whole world thought Sonia Gandhi was going to become India’s next prime minister some senior BJP leaders consulted an astrologer who predicted that this was not going to happen. He knew for certain, he said, that Sonia Gandhi was never going to be prime minister of India. The next day when Sonia’s ‘inner voice’ wisely advised her to turn down the job, these senior leaders raced back to the astrologer and asked what else he could see in the future. And, he, heady with his own prowess, told them that Dr Manmohan Singh’s government would not survive beyond September 2004. So between May and September the old men who lead our main opposition party put their feet up, indulged their wives and children, and waited for the government to fall.

So certain were they of the astrologer’s powers that they did nothing by way of analysing reasons for their defeat. Of comment there was some — India Shining was a bad slogan — of analysis there was absolutely none. So when the government survived they were lost once more. There was a bit of hulla-gulla in Parliament and the odd ‘yatra’, but not the smallest attempt to rebuild the party. More seriously, the party that has spent nearly all of its life on the opposition benches seemed incapable of playing its role as a proper opposition party.

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