As the Bharatiya Janata Party seeks another leader to ride the rath to nowhere, Manmohan Singh might murmur to himself those self-deprecatory lines penned by another prime minister, Clement Attlee, whose unassuming effectiveness matched his own:

“Few thought he was even a starter
There were many who thought themselves smarter
But he ended PM, CH and OM
An earl and a Knight of the Garter.”

India doesn’t boast the CH (Companion of Honour), OM (Order of Merit) or the Most Noble Order of the Garter, but the comparison can be extended to another point. Churchill’s mean comment that the Labour leader who presided over Indian independence was a modest man “who had plenty to be modest about” was echoed by Lal Krishna Advani’s swipe about a “weak” prime minister. The judgment of history differed in both cases from carping rivals.

G.V.L. Narasimha Rao, the BJP’s in-house analyst, argues that Advani’s assessment was not wrong. Where the former prime minister-in-waiting erred was in believing that this weakness mattered to voters. The wider implications of that explanation deserve examination. Indeed, this is a time for introspection, for Manmohan Singh, Rahul Gandhi (and his mother) and for Advani too. They all have a crucial part to play in a process that also says something about the Indian people.

As the first of the trio to go quietly (or otherwise) into the night, Advani must be anxious to ensure that the party that had such high hopes only a month ago doesn’t go with him. Voters cannot be blamed for feeling confused, if not betrayed, when the man who projected the BJP as guardian of the Hindu (which he would insist was synonymous with Indian) identity seemed suddenly bent on making it a clone of the inclusive Congress. So much so that Shankersinh Vaghela, the Union minister for textiles and Congress candidate from Panchmahals in Gujarat, roundly accused Narendra Modi himself of being anti-Hindu. “He has destroyed 200 temples in Gandhinagar alone,” the minister thundered during a chat near Godhra. “He is worse than Mahmud of Ghazni!”

It’s an insulting parallel to draw in a region where the destruction of Somnath in 1025 is still an emotive issue and where Jawaharlal Nehru’s objection in 1951 to Rajendra Prasad gracing the reconstruction still rankles. But it is possible because paeans of praise by his supporters present Modi as a latter-day Indian variant of the liberal Yankees whom Deep South Americans mocked as “nigger-lovers”. But for his commitment to building a Ram temple in Ayodhya, Advani could have subscribed to the Congress manifesto’s pledge “to work to ensure a life of Security, Dignity and Prosperity for every citizen” and uphold the “core values and ideology” of “secularism, nationalism, social justice, and economic growth for all, especially for the aam admi”.

What could be more secular than Advani’s “Sashtang Namaskar” at the altar of a “consultative mechanism” so that more than 1,000 priests of all faiths could advise him had he become prime minister? No wonder Shatrughan Sinha suggested a BJP-Congress combine at the Centre. Shot Gun was shot down for his naïve cheekiness. Core supporters yearn for a robust BJP to cure their sense of insecurity, to uphold their threatened identity and offer protection from the enemy within and without. Not a party that is neither fish nor flesh. Modernists like Arun Jaitley or gentlemen like Jaswant Singh cannot meet needs that demand traditionalists like Rajnath Singh or the young Varun Gandhi. A Gandhi versus Gandhi duel, one brandishing the Lotus against his cousin’s Hand, is something to look forward to in 2014. Varun, proclaiming aloud what others dare not say, is the ideal star of the majoritarian agenda about which Advani and Modi have suddenly — and disastrously for the BJP — become so coy.

Lavish praise is being heaped on Rahul, whose hand is seen in the Congress gains in Bihar and Uttar Pradesh; by the time this appears he may have succumbed to pressure to join the cabinet. But he may not, heeding the advice of a Chinese octogenarian he respects. Lee Kuan Yew’s influence is so pervasive that his “Minister Mentor” title has inspired copycats in the Confederation of Indian Industry, Infosys and the Bengal Chamber of Commerce and Industry. When I was researching a book on Singapore’s — read Lee’s — ties with India, he told me he had warned Rahul that name, recognition and good looks were passing assets. Rahul would do best to avoid public office until he had gathered sufficient experience, assembled a team of honest and efficient administrators and was confident of being able to deliver.

Public adulation of Rahul and Sonia Gandhi confirms the medieval monarchical mindset that this column has discussed before. Pictures of a supporter taking off his slippers to prostrate himself three times — Advani’s Sashtang Namaskar — before a serenely standing Jayalalithaa confirmed the extent to which Indian orthodoxy has internalized the Westminster system. Being Western-educated, Indira Gandhi recoiled from such obeisance and always snapped at people trying to touch her feet, but a distant goddess only increased their devotion. Presumably, that is also the aloof Sonia’s appeal for the masses. Rahul is the handsome young god come down from Mount Olympus, where his mother is enthroned, to rule the universe, to give Dalit woes a patient hearing and share peasant hardships.

The prospect of revolution, especially preached by such highly unlikely prophets as Prakash and Brinda Karat, has nothing to compare with that vision. The Indian voter is shrewd enough to know that but for a handful of exceptions, communist leaders are capitalists at heart. Some are also so in private life.

No such slander is ever breathed about Manmohan Singh. But, then, neither has he ever received the adulation that is lavished on the deified Gandhis. He would probably be intensely embarrassed by it. But there’s a job to be done and people know he will do it to the best of his ability without seeking personal or ideological dividends from the execution. That is probably why, as the historians keep dinning into us, he is the only prime minister since Nehru in 1957 to be re-elected after completing a full five-year term. That also explains the rare feat of an incumbent being returned during a recession.

The two distinctions only compound the challenge of his second coming. As G.V.L. Narasimha Rao said in despairing disparagement (or, perhaps, just as an acknowledgment of Indian reality), voters don’t mind if Manmohan Singh is seen to consult Sonia Gandhi. Clearly, neither does he mind being seen to be doing so. That makes for a harmonious team which is acceptable to the electorate. But while political decisions accounting for the initial delay in pushing forward with the 123 agreement because of fears that it would alienate Muslim voters may be attributed to the party president, the final decision to clinch the deal, cost what it may, was his.

Manmohan Singh must know that even if he is not praised too much for the government’s achievements, he alone will be blamed for the government’s failures. The responsibility is all the greater when unsettled conditions in Nepal, Bangladesh and Sri Lanka, and a Pakistan on the verge of collapse make Delhi an island of stability surrounded by an arc of instability, and India a special target of terrorist attacks. But as Thomas “Tip” O’Neill, the Speaker of the American House of Representatives for a whole decade, pithily put it, “All politics is local.” The burden of sustaining economic reforms, of salvaging the growth rate and creating an infrastructure permanently to redeem Indians from grinding poverty are his priorities. But the first task is to contain and cure the swine flu that has struck the country as Manmohan Singh goes back to South Block. Seldom can a prime ministerial reputation have been linked to such a mundane threat.