By Amulya Ganguli

Thursday's lunar eclipse was an appropriate, if inauspicious, setting for the Bharatiya Janata Party's (BJP) National Executive meeting in Dehradun. Ever since its defeat in the 2004 general election, the party has been in the dark shadows at the national level with little chance of emerging into sunlight in the near future.

Even in the states, the shadows have lengthened. While defections in Jharkhand have reduced the BJP-led government to a minority, several members have quit the party in Uttar Pradesh, which faces a crucial election next year. And in Madhya Pradesh, the involvement of pro-BJP student activists in the death of a teacher has put the party on the defensive.

If the BJP is seemingly falling apart, the reason can be traced to a growing leadership vacuum at the top. While age and ideological incompatibilities have hobbled the two senior most leaders, Atal Bihari Vajpayee and L.K. Advani, the next generation is clearly not yet ready to step into their shoes.

Besides, GenNext suffered a blow recently not only because of the murder of the rising star Pramod Mahajan by his own brother but also because of the subsequent involvement of the dead leader's son in a case of drug abuse - a scandal which undermined the BJP's pretensions about following higher standards of conduct.

Even if Vajpayee remains the best bet so far as wider acceptability is concerned among the BJP's allies and within the country, it is obvious that he is not in the best of health. And Advani is yet to patch up his differences with the paterfamilias, the Rashtriya Swayamsewak Sangh (RSS), which ensured his ouster from party presidency because of his favourable comments on Mohammed Ali Jinnah during a visit to Pakistan.

While the present president, Rajnath Singh, has the look of a provincial satrap ill at ease at the national level, previous occupants of the post like M. Venkaiah Naidu have never seemed capable of carrying the entire party with them or, like Murli Manohar Joshi, appeared too inflexible to appeal to a wider audience.

It is not surprising, therefore, that recent opinion polls have shown the BJP on a downward slide, failing to retain even the 138 seats it won in 2004 and, as a result, taking its allies down to a lower total in the Lok Sabha, the lower house of parliament, than the 189 which the National Democratic Alliance (NDA) won on the last occasion.

The beneficiary, as may be expected, from the BJP's and the NDA's decline is the Congress, which currently seems to be even more securely in power than when it assumed charge.

Because of the setback in its fortunes, the BJP is now seemingly clutching at straws to stay afloat. But these frenetic attempts to regain political relevance carry the danger of plunging it into further depths.

Nothing showed its desperation more than the eagerness with which it seized on the newly revived Vande Mataram (Hail to the Motherland) issue to make its presence felt. Although it was the Congress's idea to observe the centenary of the Vande Mataram's adoption as the National Song, the BJP quickly grabbed it to refurbish its patriotic credentials.

In the process, however, all that it may have succeeded in doing is, first, to expose its vacuity of ideas as an opposition party for taking on the government and, second, to reinforce its communal image.

As is known, the Muslims have always harboured reservations about the song because of its Hindu imagery after the first two stanzas. This was the reason why, in 1937, stalwarts of the freedom movement like Jawaharlal Nehru, Subhas Chandra Bose and Abul Kalam Azad decided, on the advice of Rabindranath Tagore, that only the first two stanzas would be sung at public functions.

The BJP's insistence, however, that not only the entire song should be sung but that it should also be made mandatory in schools, including the madrassas, showed that it was more interested in provoking the Muslims than in spreading patriotic fervour. The patent objective, as at the time of the Ram temple campaign, is to curry favour with communal-minded Hindus and thereby strengthen the party's core base of support.

Unfortunately, however, success of these divisive tactics, which paid handsome electoral dividends for the BJP in the 1990s, is no longer assured. Even its ally in Bihar, Chief Minister Nitish Kumar, was unwilling to echo the BJP's views while the religious body of the Sikhs, the Shiromani Gurdwara Prabandhak Committee, which is associated with the Akali Dal, another ally of the BJP, seemed uncertain about making the song compulsory.

Letters have also appeared in newspapers from Christians, who have voiced the same feelings as the Muslims about the BJP's use of the song to test the loyalty of a community.

The BJP's effort to wrap itself in the national flag also received a damaging blow because of the shocking incidents in Ujjain, a town in the BJP-ruled Madhya Pradesh, where the Akhil Bharatiya Vidyarthi Parishad (ABVP) has become involved in the murderous attack of a professor.

Even more than the tragedy, the seemingly partisan behaviour of the state government, with Chief Minister Shivraj Singh Chauhan ascribing the death to an accident during a student demonstration, has cast doubts on whether the law would be allowed to follow its own course.

As the Supreme Court's intervention in the cases of the Gujarat riots showed, the BJP governments are not above bending the system to ensure that its cadres as well as those of fraternal Hindutva outfits like the Vishwa Hindu Parishad and Bajrang Dal are not found guilty. There is little doubt that similar efforts to save the ABVP followers from the guardians of the law are being made in Madhya Pradesh.

Since the National Human Rights Commission has already begun inquiring into the affair, as it did earlier in Gujarat, the BJP's credibility is sinking all the time.

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