If there is one political party in India which knows how to create the impression that it’s laying down the national agenda when it isn’t, it’s surely the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP). That’s the message its national council meeting in Lucknow sent out when Mr Atal Behari Vajpayee declared that “the road to power in New Delhi passes via Lucknow” and exhorted the party to win the coming elections to the Uttar Pradesh Assembly.

Senior BJP leaders themselves manufactured this upbeat appearance. They highlighted the issue of who would lead the party in the next Lok Sabha elections as if it were part of the real agenda. Mr LK Advani set the ball rolling in a recent television interview when he said he would be the natural candidate for the Prime Minister's job should the BJP come to power; yet he doesn't expect Mr Vajpayee to nominate him. Soon, Mr MM Joshi, another would-be PM, declared there’s no dearth of prime ministerial candidates in the BJP. 

It was left to Mr Rajnath Singh, anointed BJP president for three more years, to put in the next claim. Mr Singh used colourful, semi-rustic imagery, of baratis (the bridegroom’s party) only waiting to carry the bride, satta ki sundari (deity of power) to Delhi, and hinted that he himself might be the dulah (bridegroom). Meanwhile, Mr Narendra Modi strutted around as if he were Mr Vajpayee’s successor, being the only senior second-generation leader to wield state power.

However, it’s preposterous to regard the issue of BJP leadership in 2009 as relevant today. One must be irrationally exuberant to be convinced that the BJP will probably return to power in the next general elections, or that leadership will be the main determinant of its fate.

The BJP has been in steep decline since its 2004 Lok Sabha defeat. Many of its partners have deserted its National Democratic Alliance. The party's consistently poor performance in by-elections, its loss of power in Jharkhand, and the demoralisation of many of its state units all point to this. The murder of Pramod Mahajan, the party’s brightest second-generation leader, by his own brother, and the defection of Ms Uma Bharati, the fiery leader with the widest OBC appeal, were major setbacks too.

It’s only in urban UP that the BJP has registered gains. During recent three-tier municipal elections, it won eight out of 12 large-city mayoral positions. (It had won six even in 2001.) In smaller towns, it was comprehensively defeated by the Samajwadi Party.

Yet, BJP leaders presented these results as a triumph heralding the party’s ascent to national power. In reality, the local elections weren’t even representative because the Bahujan Samaj Party, one of UP’s Big Two, didn’t contest them. In fact, the BSP covertly backed select candidates, including many from the BJP, to defeat its principal rival, the SP.

The BJP benefited from two factors: anti-incumbency against Chief Minister Mulayam Singh Yadav, and communal polarisation triggered by the Haji Yakub episode (in which he offered Rs 50 crores to kill the Danish cartoonist who had ridiculed Prophet Mohammed), and the government's refusal to ban the Students’ Islamic Movement of India.

Ironically, a strange confluence of interests has developed between the two rivals, BJP and SP. The harder Mr Yadav tries to woo the Muslim constituency that’s now suspicious of him, the more the upper-caste Hindu vote shifts towards the BJP. It’s not for nothing that Mr Yadav offered 5-star hospitality in Lucknow to BJP top brass citing  “protocol”, and they accepted it.

Despite these advantages, the BJP only made modest gains in the local elections. It’s unclear whether these will reverse its long downslide. The party’s UP Assembly strength has plummeted from the 1991 peak of  221 (of 419 seats) to just 88 (of a total of 403), and its Lok Sabha tally from UP shrunk from 51 to only 10. For a party long in the Number Three slot in UP, a reversal looks highly unlikely.

However, BJP leaders have taken heart from what they regard as the “Muslim appeasement” card played by the United Progressive Alliance government through the Sachar Committee, which recommends affirmative action for Muslims.

In Lucknow, there was full-throated condemnation of "Muslim appeasement", warnings about India’s “second partition”, fanatical appeals to build a grand Ram temple at Ayodhya, and contrived bemoaning of the alleged reduction of Hindus to the status of "second-class citizens". Leader after BJP leader spewed venom on Muslims and hysterically warned against a “sell-out” on Kashmir and Siachen.

The BJP should know better. Sachar is no Shah Bano. In 1984, the Congress government amended secular laws to please those clamouring against modest compensation for a poor, deserted old woman. The Sachar report is a serious, well-considered, solidly documented analysis of exclusion of and discrimination against Muslims. It pleads for diversity and pluralism—not for sectarian solutions. It should occasion sober reflection on Indian society’s failure to prevent the creation of a new underclass of disadvantaged people and promote full representation of all social groups—without prejudice.

It’s extremely unlikely that the “appeasement” card will work given the present national mood, which favours integration and respect for inclusion and equity. The mood also frowns upon paranoid notions of national identity. There is widespread support for a durable and just peace with Pakistan and a border settlement and broad cooperation with China.

It's even more unlikely that the Ayodhya plank will sell. As the Sangh Parivar's own countless futile attempts to organise yatras on the issue show, the public is simply not interested in this agenda of hatred and revenge. The agenda doesn’t earn votes anywhere.

The BJP’s return to hardline Hindutva represents a terrible retrogression . It’s not in the interest of democracy and pluralism that India’s largest opposition party should embrace such a narrow, divisive, communal agenda. This demolishes the hope that leaders like Mr Vajpayee would somehow neutralise the RSS’s malign influence and push the BJP towards moderation. If he couldn’t do this while in power, it’s ludicrous to expect him to do so after he’s lost it.

In line with this Rightward ideological-political shift, the BJP has also executed an organisational shift. It has amended its constitution so that all its secretaries at the national and state levels are pracharaks  or full-time Sangh propagandists. The RSS influence has been starkly visible in all recent BJP campaigns.

Mr Rajnath Singh has further strengthened this influence—not least because he lacks an independent base and needs the Sangh’s crutches. The RSS in turn is only too happy at the revival of the three contentious issues—Ram temple, Uniform Civil Code, and Article 370—which were put on hold in 1998 for dishonourable reasons—expediency and greed for power.

The Lucknow conclave leaves the BJP’s structural crisis unresolved. Ideologically, the party is trapped between orthodox, Islamophobic, Hindutva typical of small-town traders and upper-caste groups, on the one hand, and pro-globalisation Big Business, on the other. Politically, it’s divided between its identity as an ethno-religious movement, and electoral compulsions which propel it into opportunistic alliances. Organisationally, it cannot sever its umbilical chord with the Sangh Parivar.

As this Column has often argued, the BJP’s ascendancy from the mid-1980s to the late 1990s was founded on three mutually reinforcing factors. First, the Congress’s long-term decline owing to its compromises with communalism and market fundamentalism. This, coupled with the Left’s stagnation after the Soviet Union’s collapse, shifted India’s political spectrum Rightwards.

Second, the BJP-VHP’s mobilisation around Ayodhya in the late 1980s allowed Hindutva to percolate widely. For the first time, the BJP broke out of its narrow savarna Hindu-Hindi confines. And third, its “social engineering” strategy, of combining “Mandal” with “Kamandal”, helped it attract OBC support in the Hindi belt.

None of these factors operates today. The Congress has revived itself. The Left has expanded. Regional parties with subaltern agendas have grown. And the centre of gravity of Indian politics has shifted Leftwards. Social justice has displaced Ayodhya.

The BJP is disoriented by all this. Until recently, it was in outright denial of its 2004 defeat  It still has no political strategy to revitalise itself. Its leadership crisis remain serious. Its president is a narrow-minded provincial Thakur politician. He isn’t even remotely acquainted with the India that’s outside the Hindi belt.

Lurking behind him is Mr Narendra Modi, who, sadly, enjoys a high level of acceptance within the BJP and behaves as its de facto Number Two, next only to Mr Vajpayee.

The BJP is caught between aspiring leaders of such appalling quality, and geriatric veterans who are increasingly out-of-sync with reality, but refuse to fade out. It’s likely to remain suspended in this unenviable state for some time.—end—