The loneliness of Atal Bihari Vajpayee is a bit more than a personal crisis in the life of the country's most popular politician. It has become the nearly fatal crisis in the life of the Bharatiya Janata Party, which, as a party in power, is still very young-just four years old. Today, after Godhra-Ahmedabad-Ayodhya, if the party looks tired and tiring, it is not entirely because of the enraged Ram devotee. A great deal of the blame has to be accepted by the leadership-rather the leader, Vajpayee himself. For, as the most famous face of the party, and also as the prime minister, his voice and gestures are supposed to carry a sense of direction, of vision. Not that Vajpayee is not trying. Rather, in the course of Ayodhya Part II, the prime minister tried, in his own lately acquired inimitable style of passive remoteness, to play peacemaker-in-chief. He wanted to be above the party, above its natural symbols and ideological ethos. He perhaps wanted a place in history-Lahore could not achieve it, Agra couldn't achieve it, maybe Ayodhya will do it ... Ayodhya didn't erupt, but the party or the prime minister didn't emerge stronger and Vajpayee certainly didn't gain that much-desired place in history.

What he has gained is that fragile space between life and death-life in power and death of the party identity. Power today for the BJP has become a delicate act of survival and each day in office is marked by the party's further isolation within the Sangh Parivar. For, the H-word is back in action and the BJP doesn't know how to come to terms with it. That is indeed strange. It looks like the so-called coalition dharma has become the BJP's bad karma. In this coalition, the BJP alone seems to have no freedom to pursue its agenda, its slogans and values. Stranger is the fact that the party itself has shown little or no interest in articulating its ideas at a time when assertion of identity is a political must for any party that claims to be different-and the BJP has all along claimed to be different. The debacle in the Uttar Pradesh assembly election was a harsh reminder. Anywhere else, it could have been the leader's moment. Here, the leader wanted to be different from the party. That was Vajpayee's mistake. His negation of Hindutva was not followed by an alternative Vajpayee vision. It was as if he had nothing at stake except his own individual image, which itself has become underwhelming. The leader is withering away, and the party is following.