The BJP went with the thoroughly discredited, corrupt, unsavoury and unreliable Mr Soren mainly to keep the Congress out of power, and to please the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, which can function best when the BJP is in government. The Congress-led front, which won 25 seats, could have easily joined shared power with Mr Soren. It acted from a position of strength and didn't succumb to that temptation. Mr Soren is incapable of running an administration that's not a money-making and patronage-distribution machine working for his friends and relations.

The BJP decided to collaborate with Mr. Soren despite his known disdain for it—and despite the public views of some of its leaders, including national spokesperson Rajiv Prasad Rudy. Only weeks ago, the BJP wanted Mr. Soren jailed for corruption.

This is the first significant decision made by new BJP president Nitin Gadkari and will probably turn out his first blunder following an inauspicious start, with the BJP losing the Legislative Council elections in his hometown, Nagpur. Mr. Gadkari's elevation as BJP president is part of a larger organisational transition. The post of the Leader of the Opposition in the Lok Sabha has gone from Mr. LK Advani to Ms Sushma Swaraj. And Mr Arun Jaitley (59) has replaced the 71-year-old Jaswant Singh as the BJP's Rajya Sabha leader.

Younger leaders have indeed risen in the BJP as Mr. Atal Behari Vajpayee and Mr Advani—the longest-standing Prime Ministerial-aspirant-not-to-be-PM—fade into the sunset. But the party hasn't acquired a youthful, energetic character or made a transition to new political ideas, better leadership or strategies that can prevent its continuing decline and help it regain some of the influence it has lost after two successive national election routs.

There are three reasons to be sceptical about the effectiveness of the BJP's ad hoc and awkward transition. Two of the three changes are purely nominal. The positions of Leaders of the Opposition in Parliament are largely decorative. In any case, Ms Swaraj, who got elected to the Lok Sabha almost by fluke—because her Congress opponent didn't fill out his nomination papers correctly—is a poor substitute for Mr Advani.

Whatever one's view of Mr. Advani's politics—and I have never hidden my distaste for their deeply, obnoxiously communal content—there's no denying that he's a parliamentarian with decades-long experience. Ms Swaraj, who has lost four Lok Sabha elections, cannot even remotely claim that stature. Similarly, Mr. Gadkari (52) is only slightly younger than Mr. Rajnath Singh (58)—hardly a generational change.

Second, with Mr. Gadkari as its president, the BJP has replaced one provincial leader with another. Mr. Singh was at least exposed to Hindi heartland politics. Mr. Gadkari has had no exposure whatever to politics outside Maharashtra. A Brahmin who has been in the RSS since his childhood, he's no mass leader either. Ever since he lost a Maharashtra Assembly election from Nagpur in 1985, he has been content to be a member of the Legislative Council.

Mr. Gadkari is projected by the RSS and a section of the media as a dynamic, efficient leader who believes in “getting things done”. They depict him as Vikas Purush (Man of Development)—largely because he launched the Mumbai-Pune Expressway, and 55 flyovers in Mumbai and 10 in Nagpur as Maharashtra's Public Works Minister in the 1990s.

However, these projects are no indicators of progress, but may be the very opposite. The Expressway, for instance, is an extremely expensive project which has caused significant environmental destruction in a fragile part of the Western Ghats, which is already under stress from the predatory activities of township developers like Lavasa and Amby Valley.

Vehicles are forced to use the Expressway by paying a high toll because no other road exists or parallel sub-routes are deliberately left un-maintained and made unusable. The Expressway doesn't follow international safety standards on gradients, curve angles or shoulders, and has become the site of a disproportionate number of accidents.

The government is subsidising the Expressway despite the guaranteed high traffic, much corner-cutting and large revenue generation through selling prime hoarding spaces. There's also the additional social cost in promoting road transportation, in particular private trucks and cars in place of railways. Rail transport per tonne- or passenger-kilometre is almost 60 percent cheaper than road transport and consumes much less energy and other resources. The Mumbai-Pune rail link is one of the most efficient in India. Augmenting rail capacity would be vastly preferable to making a huge investment in an inappropriate mode of transport with high greenhouse gas emissions.

Similar questions can also be raised about flyovers which are disfiguring urban India and destroying numerous city centres—and hence their distinct identity and sense of community. Flyovers have limited uses: for instance, in crossing a railway line, or in interconnecting highways outside urban limits. But they do not, generally speaking, contribute to reducing congestion or improving traffic speed.

Usually, flyovers merely redistribute congestion: you move fast along a flyover between two busy junctions—only to arrive at a third, extremely congested, junction. Besides, flyovers are not conducive to public transport. Buses cannot stop on them. That's why no major city in the West has flyovers inside its urban limits.

So Mr. Gadkari's so-called “accomplishments” have probably entailed an abuse of scarce road space and contributed to greater traffic congestion in Mumbai and Nagpur. His “dynamism”, say engineers familiar with his work, largely consisted in giving the PWD and the Maharashtra State Road Development Corporation a free hand in executing extravagant projects.

Mr. Gadkari is a businessman who owns orange orchards, a chain of stores, and a small 26 Megawatt power station, attached to his Purti Sugar Industries, which sells electricity to Mr. Anil Ambani's Reliance Energy. His notions of efficiency and development are those of a businessman, not of a leader who believes in inclusive, people-oriented politics.

It's thus extremely doubtful if the new BJP president brings any political capital, insight or experience to the party which can help stem its decline. Mr. Gadkari is a sub-regional faction leader, who could never patch up his rivalry with the late Pramod Mahajan and his brother-in-law and BJP heavyweight Gopinath Munde, an Other Backward Classes leader from the Marathwada region.

Mr. Gadkari has tried to project himself as someone who believes in inner-party dialogue and harmony. He has advocated a dialogue in Rajasthan with estranged former Chief Minister Vasundhara Raje and said he would like to bring back into the party expelled leaders such as Messrs Govindacharya and Kalyan Singh and Ms Uma Bharti. But his own record of resolving factional differences with the Maharashtra BJP is extremely patchy, if not poor.

The third reason for being sceptical of the worth of the BJP's Generation-Next shift is that the change has been scripted by the RSS. It's the RSS which demanded that Mr Advani step down as the Leader of the Opposition in the Lok Sabha, and that the next president should not be chosen from among the four second-generation people who dominate the party's central apparatus: Messrs Arun Jaitley, M Venkaiah Naidu and HN Ananth Kumar and Ms Swaraj. The RSS finally decided on Mr. Gadkari. But its first choice, like Mr. Advani's, was (surprise! surprise!!) Mr Narendra Modi. But Mr. Modi refused and the Sangh zeroed in on Mr. Gadkari.

The RSS has tightened its vice-like grip on the BJP. Having first seized the party's machinery by appointing its pracharaks as organisational secretaries of party state units two years ago, it now dictates terms to the BJP on ideology, political strategy and composition of its office-bearers. But the RSS lacks political acumen and strategy. It's an ideologically driven organisation, which is accountable to nobody and profoundly undemocratic—all appointments are by made the Sarsanghchalak. The RSS has a uniquely sectarian project of destroying India's essential character as a multicultural, plural and multi-religious society.

The RSS's priorities are qualitatively different from those of a normal political party working in a competitive democratic environment. For it, the advancement of Hindutva is far more important than power gained through social coalitions of different classes and castes and linked to programmes and policies.

RSS domination is likely to further aggravate the BJP's multiple crises of ideology, political strategy and organisational incoherence and widen the rift between its acolytes inside the BJP and those who wish to limit RSS influence. Mr. Gadkari is unlikely to win wide acceptance from the BJP's second-generation leaders, who are engaged in a permanent turf war. This hollow and tortuous generational transition won't rejuvenate the BJP. (IPA Service)