Apart from the Congress, the Jan Sangh/BJP is the oldest party still around. The CPI is the only other. While the Congress has split several times, the first time in 1969, again later in the 1970s, and CPI spawned CPM, the Jan Sangh/BJP has never split. It is also the only party with an internal democratic system, which the Congress has by now abandoned and the CPI never believed in.

Neither longevity nor internal democracy has been of much help to the BJP in the last five years. After a Herculean effort, it got elected in 1996, and again in 1998 and 1999, but then it was exhausted. It lost the 2004 election inadvertently, surprised itself and ever since then has not found its way back. This happens to parties that lose power when they least expect it. It happened to the Labour Party in 1979. It took the Labour Party three more defeats before it got itself electable.

The BJP has at least begun to recognise that it has a problem, though it should not have taken seven months after the May 2009 defeat. It was obviously difficult for Advani to resign immediately upon defeat and the party at large could not tell an elder to get out.

So, after the confusion of the August Chintan Baithak, we now have a compromise. There is at least a change of guard and a new face at the helm of the party. The RSS has decided that it cannot any longer be the power behind the throne. It has to take charge of the party hands on.

The choice of Gadkari is, however, a cautious one. I had expected the RSS to opt for Manohar Parrikar who, as chief minister of Goa and an IIT graduate, has both top executive experience and a modern image. But the choice fell on a proper Marathi speaker since RSS is in the final analysis a Marathi outfit. Yet the transparent control of RSS over the BJP is a good thing. It is best to have these things in the open.

Gadkari will need to restructure the Party offices, which became quite moribund during the NDA government period. But the major problem of the BJP is not organisation, but ideology. As the Labour Party found, after each defeat the Party faithfuls want to reinforce the orthodoxy that had just been rejected. They forget that in a democracy a party has to capture not so much the faithful and dedicated, but the undecided and hesitating voters.

The BJP had been enticed into a centrist stance by Vajpayee. He was trusted so totally that no one suspected him of deviating from the true path. He thus managed to make the BJP electable and won three elections in a row, a record matched only by Panditji.

Advani had made his name as a hard-line ideologue and organiser while Vajpayee was there. But by nature he is a moderate person. When he tried after 2004 to bring out his moderate reasonable nature, both the BJP and the RSS were very unhappy. They believed quite wrongly that the voters wanted the raw meat (apologies to BJP vegetarians) of Hindutva and not the daal-roti of a reasonable mid-stream ideology.

What Atalji could get away with, Lal Krishnaji could not. In the final stages of the 2009 elections, Advani tried to become his fiercer self with Narendra Modi at his side but the game was up.

Labour Party redefined its old style Socialism as Left of Centre progressive radicalism and sold it to the electorate to win three victories. The BJP has to find a modern repackaging of Hindutva so that the new generation of Indians born since Indira Gandhi?s days will find something to identify with. Their insecurity is economic, not religious or political. The Partition is old history for them and Muslims are the heartthrobs in Bollywood and not aliens. Hence the need to repackage.

There is a gap in the political spectrum on the Right of Centre. India needs a pro-business party, somewhat like the Swatantra Party. Twenty years after liberal reform, the themes of anti-bureaucracy and accelerated growth can win many more voters for the BJP.

It can be done. The hard task is to look ahead, not backwards.

?The author is a prominent economist and Labour peer