It was a calamitous revelation. Last weekend in Goa, the mask fell off the face of Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee and crashed on the beach. The nation was shocked. For so long this deception, Mr Vajpayee. How could you utter those words, so divisive, so hateful, so, so Modi-esque! Hold a mirror and look, you are intolerably saffron, as bad as the rest in the horrible Parivar. You were the moderate, the human face of Hindutva, and it was not long ago you said in Ahmedabad that what happened in Gujarat was a national shame, that the carnage tarnished the international image of the country ... and now you have spoken your true mind. So goes the script of the Great Vajpayee Betrayal as articulated by the newly energised conscience class of India. And the Vajpayee betrayal? At a public speech after the National Executive meeting of his party, he reportedly highlighted the relationship between Islam and social unrest in a global context. Enough for the unmasked Vajpayee to become a hardback edition of Narendra Modi, the most favoured demon in Indian politics today. Does this, as the professional conscience class insists, mark a defining point in the evolutionary story of Vajpayee?

Perhaps it's the wrong context in which to ask that question. Firstly, those who criticise Vajpayee forget that apart from being the prime minister of India he also happens to be the leader of the BJP. And it is quite natural for the BJP leader to talk politics and society and ideology on a party forum. The George Bush who speaks at the Republican convention is not the same as the Bush who delivers the State of the Union address. In Gujarat, Vajpayee was the prime minister; in Goa, he was the big BJP leader. He was within his political rights to talk Hindutva in a language understandable to his political constituency. As to how much the Goa speech marks a significant point in the Vajpayee evolution, well, he has never disowned Hindutva. Rather, of late, the erstwhile Great Communicator of the Parivar has been miserably ineffective in articulating the essential voice of the party. That is why Vajpayee personifies a generational dead end for the BJP. At this moment in the life of the party, he is neither mask nor mascot. He, along with some other veterans in the Parivar, magnifies the urgency for a generational shift in a party that has a legitimate space in India. To keep that space growing, the BJP has to look beyond Goa, Gujarat and Vajpayee.