But the party's defeat in two successive general elections has exposed his inadequacies.

His unsteady hands on the rudder have not only set off an internal turmoil with several influential members questioning his decisions, but his nervousness has made him act without much forethought, as in expelling Jaswant Singh for writing a book on Jinnah. Having taken such an extreme step where the party should have been more patient, Rajnath Singh has had to swallow the insult of being called Humpty Dumpty and Alice in Blunderland by Arun Shourie without taking any immediate disciplinary action.

Seeing his and the party's helplessness, Jaswant Singh, who now doesn't have much to fear, has stepped up the ante by comparing the BJP with the Ku Klux Klan, the white supremacist hate group in the United States.

What all this contretemps suggest is that the party is unlikely to get back on its feet in the near future - if at all. The outlook for it is bleak because, first, there will be even bigger tremors if the reins are grabbed by, say, Narendra Modi, who is unacceptable to the BJP's partners in the National Democratic Alliance (NDA), or Murli Manohar Joshi, who is as dour and unimpressive as Rajnath Singh, or Venkaiah Naidu, who is not taken seriously by anyone inside or outside the party, or the smart-alecky Arun Jaitley, or the shrill Sushma Swaraj, who had threatened to shave her head if Sonia Gandhi became prime minister.

Secondly, it isn't only that the BJP has no worthwhile leaders, its ideology, too, is under a strain - as, indeed, it has been ever since it failed to keep the promise of building the Ram temple in Ayodhya even when it was in power at the centre.

Now, its meaning has been questioned by Jaswant Singh, who sought clarifications on the concept of Hindutva before his expulsion, and also by the BJP's Muslim members who have been unnerved by Varun Gandhi's virulent anti-Muslim rhetoric.

There is also a belief among the moderate sections in the BJP that Hindutva has lost its appeal. It was not the first choice as an ideology any way during early in its life when the party preferred the vague concept of Gandhian socialism. The BJP turned to Hindutva only in 1989 after the Vishwa Hindu Parishad (VHP) raised the question of 'liberating' Ram's putative birthplace in Ayodhya where the Babri Masjid stood.

But two decades later, the issue no longer pays political dividends in a secular India as it did in the 1990s. And yet, the BJP has to continue to pay lip service to it not only because it will look foolish if it formally dumped Hindutva but also because the RSS will not let it do so since it still believes in ushering in a 'homogeneous Hindu nation', in the words of its chief, Mohan Bhagwat.

With neither an inspirational leadership nor a potent ideology, the BJP appears to be lost in the political woods.

(29.08.2009-Amulya Ganguli is a political analyst. He can be reached at aganguli@mail.com)