The Bharatiya Janata Party is sick. But can Dr Lal Kishen Advani cure it? The BJP is already being described as the party of ?two babas (old men)?. Both Advani and Atal Bihari Vajpayee are at the fag end of their political careers. The party which has little prospect of coming to power till 2009, needed somebody who could lead it to electoral victory five years hence and then be the prime minister for another five.

Yet the BJP has chosen 77-year old L.K. Advani as its next president. Advani would be 82 when the next general election is held. And should the BJP win that election and Advani get the top job, age-wise he would be competing with Morarji Desai as the oldest prime minister of India. And this at a time when more than two-thirds of the country?s population would be below 35 years of age.

Had the BJP thought strategically, it would have looked around for someone young with the potential to lead the party for at least a decade. It would not have shown the haste it did in anointing Advani, summoning a meeting of office-bearers and others ?available? in Delhi. Heavens would not have fallen if it had deliberated over the leadership issue. What would have been strategically desirable was sacrificed at the altar of tactics.

It is possible that even though astrologers have failed the BJP, it is still hopeful that the United Progressive Alliance will collapse under the weight of its internal contradictions. Witness therefore Vajpayee quoting to the faithful a Deutsche Bank report on the imminent collapse of the UPA at the time of the coming West Bengal elections. Advani is clearly positioning himself for that fortuitous eventuality. This is not necessarily a bad political calculation.

Was there an obvious younger leader who could have taken Advani?s place? Unfortunately for the BJP, the pure pursuit of individual ambition and power is evident not only in the two ageing leaders but also in the second rung, which is plagued with the problem of too many equals or PPMs (Potential Prime Ministers). The games of oneupmanship between these leaders are the staple of party jokes in the capital.

Recently one of these BJP leaders was insulted by another who called him a man with a ?lop-sided face? and apparently threatened to ?drag him around by his moustache? for not supporting her public programmes. She also declared that party discipline did not apply to her as she took orders only from her religious guru.

The second-rung leadership of the party is also not very inspiring for the cadre. Earlier, BJP leaders almost invariably came into the party after having been Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh pracharaks or organizers and participating in mass movements. Today, almost the entire second-rank leadership of the BJP is bereft of this experience.

This has impacted both their outlook to politics and their lifestyle. The RSS organizers were akin to full-time workers of the communist parties or erstwhile Gandhians ? frugal and simple in their day-to-day lives. There is no comparison between how a trade unionist like Dattopant Thengadi lived or how Nanaji Deshmukh or Sundar Singh Bhandari live even today and the lifestyle of the younger BJP leaders. K.S. Sudarshan, the sarsanghchalak of the RSS still does not sleep in air-conditioned comfort.

The fact is that the second rank of the BJP has not proved itself to its cadre either in politics or in the way the leaders conduct their personal lives. A clear hierarchy is yet to emerge within them. The summary removal of M. Venkaiah Naidu shows that artificial attempts at creating one will not succeed. Only those who can either win elections, pull crowds or have a political vision that transcends individual ambition will eventually be accepted as leaders of the party. In short, their leadership would have to be validated by the masses rather than by their proximity to Advani or Vajpayee.

At the programmatic level, the BJP is plagued by confusion. Hindutva paid the party rich dividends, although at tremendous cost to the country?s secular and inclusive fabric. However, today the BJP finds that like every market-expansion strategy, after a point Hindutva fetches only diminishing returns. But the party has not made a decisive choice to opt for newer strategies aimed at farmers, Dalits and other deprived sections of society. ?Cultural nationalism? and ?integral humanism? have become its catch-all terms to paper over stark choices that stare at the party.

Under these circumstances, BJP leaders themselves can indeed mistake their eagerness for power for the party?s readiness for power. However, the people clearly are not fooled. The election results are a witness to this.

What has further compounded the BJP?s problems is that the party is not renewing itself. Unable to identify with any mass movements, the dominant source of new blood for the BJP is the student movement, which essentially represents only the conservative and insular element in the middle-class yearning for self-importance. The RSS, which could have been a source of fresh blood, is itself plagued by a membership that is aging. The average age in the RSS branch meetings (shakhas) is over 55 and the attendance has been shrinking.

The main source of strength for the RSS used to be mofussil youngsters unsure of themselves in an increasingly Westernized external environment, and looking for an indigenous identity as an anchor. Today, they are no longer inward-looking. Easier access to Westernized culture and career pressures have encouraged them not to opt out of the market but become a part of it.

The RSS itself has changed tack and one of the things it is doing is to aim for the professionals ? doctors, engineers, accountants, and so on ? who may have no time for shakhas but whose Hindutva has been reinforced by the growth of Islamic fundamentalism and terror. The quality and growth in VHP membership points to this ? Praveen Togadia himself is a doctor and runs a nursing home. The RSS may still be recording growth but amongst the obscurantist urban professionals who only represent themselves and not the common people of this country.

The quality of the synergy that used to exist between the RSS and the BJP has also changed. The real and full-time general secretary of the BJP is still an RSS nominee, the rest are essentially only part-time functionaries. But in the last decade or so, the party has seen to it that the public profile of the RSS nominees in the BJP structure does not become too prominent. The last RSS man to be allowed to do so was Narendra Modi.

Under these circumstances, Advani cannot do much. He would have no choice but to follow reactive politics. The three or four journalists who advise him will ensure that with their help he continues to occupy media space. Through their efforts, the BJP would continue to be top-of-the-mind for the newspaper-reading public. If that is the modest aim that Advani has set himself, he will succeed in it. But nobody, least of all the RSS and its family of organizations, would be fooled into believing that this is the cure for the party?s unhealthy state. Advani may temporarily stabilize the patient but he has no cure for it.