Till death do us part

The world over it is usual for electoral defeat to result in the top leadership of a political party being replaced by a new one. The principle is the one you get in all team efforts, be it private corporations that let shareholders down or in sports that disappoint fans.

Why, even orangutans do it when the chief can't protect the females. In Indian politics, however, this very essential renewal is seen as amazing apostasy. Look around and see how many times the men and women under whose leadership a party has lost have been replaced.

The efforts to keep them in situ even result in the definition of defeat and victory being altered! Indian political parties, it seems, love losers.

That is perhaps why the very outspoken remarks by K Sudarshan of the RSS, who has demanded the exit of Messrs Vajpayee and Advani from the leadership of the BJP, have been greeted with disbelief, though Mr Vajpayee has recovered quickly and pitched to unseat Mr Advani, an old compatriot as well as rival.

Of all political parties in the world today, the BJP is the only one that is joined at the head with another organisation, which is the custodian of their joint ideology. It is also the only party in the world which depends for actual political work on the cadre of this organisation.

No RSS, no workers for the BJP, is what this boils down to. And without political workers, no one, not even the BJP, can win an election.

However, since the two are organically linked, the RSS too needs the BJP, without which it becomes powerless. It is this realisation that has led some ideologues of the Sangh Parivar to try and smooth things over.

But even if this means that Mr Advani gets a reprieve, it cannot be for the long term.

But the choice of a successor whom the RSS approves of is not going to be easy. The RSS would want someone like Narendra Modi, who used to be a pracharak and whose Hindutva credentials have been fully established after 2002.

But Mr Modi is a divisive personality even within the BJP. And in the last decade or so, the BJP has attracted a large number of persons who have no time for the sort of thing Mr Modi represents.

Indeed, the majority of contenders for the party presidency do not have an RSS background: Pramod Mahajan, Arun Jaitley, Sushma Swaraj, Venkaiah Naidu ... These are more in the mould of regular politicians motivated by power and, in some cases, money, and not necessarily people who have an aggressively revivalist vision of a Hindu India.

Then there are the two considerations of caste and coalition. An upper caste leader such as Rajnath Singh may be an electoral liability. But a backward leader like Uma Bharti is too volatile to be considered seriously.

And if the BJP is clear that it needs NDA-type allies, the new BJP leader will have to be acceptable to the allies as well. This too points to someone other than Mr Modi. But there is no obvious choice, and that may well be Mr Advani's trump card if he wants to play one.