Some other leaders blame the BJP's resort to Hindutva for its defeat. The RSS has jumped into the fray for the first time. Sangh ideologue MG Vaidya has scornfully dismissed this suggestion.

Shaken, party president Rajnath Singh has demanded that no leader should publicly comment on the reasons for the BJP's defeat until the issue is internally discussed. But he lacks the authority to enforce this ban. And the bitterness and hatred generated by the BJP's debacle is far too great for its leaders to keep quiet. Besides, Mr. Singh has himself played partisan politics by belatedly announcing Mr. Arun Jaitley's resignation as party general secretary.

The BJP's meanest and pettiest traits are now on display. At work here is a sense of “betrayal” by its top leadership, and frustration at its failure to discuss the causes of its dismal showing. The bitterness is understandable. The BJP ran a personality-centered campaign projecting Mr. Advani as Prime Minister in the belief that his “resolute” image would appeal to the electorate. The campaign was designed to focus entirely on Mr. Advani—from hoardings and posters, to website ads and newspaper publicity. It fell flat. But the Advani camp behaves as if it didn't.

Yet, Mr. Advani's critics aren't inspired so much by impersonal considerations as by petty ambitions and ego-driven motives. Mr. Jaswant Singh is loath to forgo his privileges as the Leader of the Opposition in the Rajya Sabha, including Cabinet rank, a spacious well-appointed room in Parliament House, and 16-strong staff. But he attacked Mr. Jaitley's elevation to the post in seemingly impersonal terms, as a reward for poor performance.

Similarly, Mr. Sinha accuses the party of putting “a premium on failure”. In his leaked letter to Mr. Rajnath Singh, he has taken a dig at Mr. Jaitley and Advani aide Sudheendra Kulkarni: “those who were responsible for the … campaign have already made their views public … apportioned blame and given themselves a clean chit.” He also says the leadership disregarded the party constitution in selecting office-bearers, in particular, appointing Ms Sushma Swaraj as the Deputy LoP in the Lok Sabha, a post to which he wanted to stake a claim.

Mr. Sinha can claim to be senior to Ms Swaraj and rooted in one constituency (Hazaribagh), while she has flitted from Haryana to Delhi to Madhya Pradesh without striking roots anywhere. He's also right to say that Mr. Jaitley has never contested a Lok Sabha election. But Mr. Sinha is no exemplar of consistency. When he lost from Hazaribagh in 2004, he had no compunction in getting a Rajya Sabha nomination. His political record is blotched, with a trajectory stretching from the Socialists, to low-grade Chandrasekhar-style niche politics based on a handful of MPs, to the BJP, which he for decades had condemned as communal.

The truth is that Mr. Sinha belongs to the BJP's “left-out” or “lost” generation, consisting of leaders in the 60-to-80 age group. It resents its exclusion from all major party posts and most of the privileged Constitutional-parliamentary positions that come the BJP's way. All these have been grabbed by Advani loyalists such as Mr. Jaitley, Ms Swaraj, Mr. Ramesh Bais (the BJP's Chief Whip in the Lok Sabha) and Mr. SS Ahluwalia (Chief Whip, Rajya Sabha).

The generation includes Mr. Murli Manohar Joshi and Mr. Arun Shourie too. They are unlikely to keep quiet over their exclusion and the anointment of younger leaders as Mr. Vajpayee-Advani's successors. What we are witnessing is not the end of the debate in the BJP over its debacle, but its beginning.

There will be unstoppable, raucous and vitriolic exchanges between the two camps into which the BJP's national leadership appears divided: one led by Mr. Advani, including loyalists Jaitley, Swaraj, Venkaiah Naidu, Ananth Kumar and Vasundhara Raje, and the other led by Mr. Rajnath Singh, which is backed by Messrs Jaswant Singh, Sinha, Gopinath Munde, Ravi Shankar Prasad, Rajiv Pratap Rudy and Vijay Goel.

Most men from the second camp, barring Maharashtra BJP president Munde, have no base worth the name anywhere. Mr Jaswant Singh, for instance, couldn't have been elected from Rajasthan given Ms Vasundhara Raje's opposition. But then, neither could many in Mr. Advani's camp. Ms Swaraj won by fluke: her opponent didn't file his nomination papers in time. Mr. Naidu can't get elected from his native Andhra. And Mr. Jaitley has never contested an election. The BJP's “internal debate” will essentially be mud-slinging by a bunch of losers.

In addition to these losers stand Mr. Narendra Modi, other BJP Chief Ministers and the super-ambitious Mr. MM Joshi. They are all waiting and watching. They may not join either camp until a winner emerges. But they will try to win support from different Sangh parivar elements, including the RSS. The prize catches are two posts, that of the BJP president and the Lok Sabha LoP, both of which fall vacant at the end of the year.

The RSS, for its part, is keen to wrest control of the BJP from Mr. Advani—just as it did in 2005 after his remarks praising Mohammed Ali Jinnah. RSS-Advani relations have worsened after Mr. Jaitley recently attributed the BJP's defeat to its “shrill” opposition to the United Progressive Alliance, and called for “moderation”. Given his own compulsive proneness to shrillness, this is odd. But let that pass.

However, what has riled the RSS the most are the interventions of Kulkarni and journalist Swapan Dasgupta, who parades himself as an ideologue. Both men are driven by vaulting ambition and have no base in the party. But they're believed to be working at Mr. Advani's behest. He probably used them to float a trial balloon. Kulkarni's article in Tehelka openly blamed the BJP's anti-Muslim bigotry for its defeat and demanded that it sever its links with the RSS. Kulkarni is a loner with a mixed-up, confused ideology of his own. His advice is written for some other party, not the BJP.

Dasgupta too wants the BJP to distance itself from the RSS and adopt a Right-wing economic, social and political agenda, without the tag of religious fundamentalism, much like Margaret Thatcher's Conservatives. Dasgupta isn't queasy about Hindutva. He has been happy with it for decades. He celebrated the Babri demolition by hugging Sadhvi Ritambhara. It's just that he thinks that Hindutva doesn't go down well with India's new middle class.

At any rate, the BJP's infighting isn't over ideology, or over rejecting or accepting Hindutva and violent anti-minority prejudices. Mr. Advani's critics are as communal as him. Mr. Sinha is no RSS man, but he was even more strident in his defence of Mr. Modi than Mr. Jaitley. Mr. Jaswant Singh is no less hawkish than Mr. Advani—although he doesn't like the RSS, and vice versa. (The RSS in 1998 vetoed his appointment as finance minister.) The BJP infighting is essentially about the loaves and fishes of office—and grabbing top organisational positions.

The BJP is in historic decline and unlikely to rebound quickly. The conjuncture or special circumstances that led to its dramatic ascent from the mid-1980s to the late 1990s has passed, including the Ayodhya mobilisation, the anti-Mandal platform against affirmative action, the vacuum created by the Congress's decline, and the rise of new elite groups looking for self-expression through militant, illiberal, ethno-religious nationalism.

That unique combination catapulted the BJP's mediocre leaders into power and created the illusion of success for its “social engineering” approach of combining elite support with the votes of the OBCs and the poor. In reality, the party was buoyed by forces and conditions it didn't even comprehend, and which may never return. The BJP's multiple crises are now set to worsen—including its ideological confusion, its political mobilisation crisis, and its organisational crisis.

The BJP, contrary to fond hopes, cannot cut the umbilical chord with the RSS. It couldn't sever it during the Janata period, when it chose to split from the parent party over the “dual membership” issue. It didn't break with the Sangh after the Babri demolition or the Gujarat pogrom. It's unlikely to sever that link now. In that sense, Mr Vaidya is right: Those who want the BJP to break from the RSS are asking for the moon.

When under pressure, the BJP is likely to turn more introvert and go “back to basics”—namely, Hindutva. That means marginalisation, going deeper back into the ghetto, losing yet more elections, and being reduced to a niche party with a limited base, like the Jana Sangh with its 20 to 35 Lok Sabha seats. Whatever happens, the BJP's internal bloodletting will continue relentlessly. (IPA Service)