The BJP knows that there is no leader in its ranks who can match Modi's popularity or have his cult following, and what awaits is a return to the Vajpayee numbers, when allies called the shots, argues Saisuresh Sivaswamy.

Till Modi came along, the BJP had not won an election solely on the strength of its Hindutva campaign.  The Sangh Parivar has no one who is being groomed as Modi's successor. There is no one in the organisation, RSS and BJP, with mass appeal.

There is an added urgency over Modi's successor because even though he will lead the BJP's 2029 election, he himself will step down after two years in office.

Speculation about Prime Minister Narendra Modi's future plans -- which received a boost when the Bharatiya Janata Party did not secure a majority of its own in 2024, received fresh impetus over the government capitulating to the Cockroach Janta Party's demand for Dharmenda Pradhan's resignation -- has now developed further legs following reports of muted public response to his 76th birthday celebrations which we were told will be massive in scale.

Alongside is the spectacle of Modi and the BJP's bete noire Rahul Gandhi's continued criticism of the government -- which shouldn't faze anyone in the ruling circles except for the fact that many in the neutral space who once jumped in with relish to ridicule him are now not so sure if they were right and he was wrong, or if he was right and they were wrong.

That's coming a long way from the popular perception that was artificially created about the Leader of the Opposition in the early years of the Modi government, and this fact alone should worry the government over anything else.

All this is not to say that the 2029 elections, which the BJP will go into with Modi leading its campaign for a record fourth time, will see a different outcome than the preceding three. Far from it.

In fact, if anything, it can be said with certainty that the National Democratic Alliance will form the next government three years hence.

But it is what follows afterwards that should worry the BJP and the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh apparatchiks in Nagpur. And this is where a little flashback is called for.

Modi did not become the prime minister when the BJP named him as its man for the top job. Long before he was coronated by the BJP in 2013, he had already been picked as a potential candidate when he was sent to helm the Gujarat government in 2002.

Till Modi came along, the BJP had not won an election solely on the strength of its Hindutva campaign.

In fact, many allies had forced the BJP to mute its shrill campaign; those were the days N Chandrababu Naidu headed the anti-BJP United front, and when Nitish Kumar did not even want posters put up of him and Modi together.

As chief minister of Gujarat Modi had one task: To make Hindutva acceptable -- not to other parties but to the people.

If this public popularity can translate into votes, it would then force other allies to buy into the new BJP, went the calculation. Gujarat was the laboratory and Modi's experiment was in full play. And the Gujarat story was tom-tommed to convince enough people that development + Hindutva was not a bad thing.

The BJP all along had the Vajpayee numbers with it anyway, which gave it around 175 seats in the Lok Sabha, give or take a few. The challenge was to retain this voter base, while adding another 75 seats -- which even L K Advani, Modi's political guru till he was upstaged by the latter, could not manage in 2009.

Modi, of course, has fine-tuned this formula into an art since his 2014 triumph.

In parallel with Modi's rise the Congress was in a state of decline after the Manmohan Singh years so it was not difficult to lure new allies to strengthen the NDA numbers.

But 2024 showed that the experiment had limited play. For the first time Modi had to depend on allies for a majority, a fact that must rankle deeply.

Modi did this adverse outcome lead the government to lean on a pliant Chief Election Commissioner into an SIR exercise of a scale and manner never seen before in history, with the deletion of crores of voters, as the critics allege. 

But the BJP has not left anyone in doubt that it will go to any length to either come to power, or retain it. But the question that must be giving sleepless nights to the RSS-BJP leadership is, will Modi be able to rally enough from the low of 2024 to reach a majority three years hence.

This assumes importance for the BJP because, unlike Modi who everyone knew was on the fast track to New Delhi, the Sangh Parivar has no one who is being groomed as Modi's successor. There is no one in the organisation, RSS and BJP, with mass appeal.

Like in the Vajpayee years, there are a bunch of chief ministers who are making a noise.

Uttar Pradesh Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath, Maharashtra's Devendra Fadnavis, Assam's Himanta Biswa Sarma and West Bengal's Suvendu Adhikari are the BJP's next-generation quartet but they all suffer from infirmities.

Biswa Sarma and Adhikari may sport saffron but the dye is recent. Yogi, considered by many to be the front-runner to succeed Modi, was not an RSS man to begin with.

But the biggest handicap for all four is that none of them has a footprint beyond their region. Did someone say Amit Shah? He counts himself out.

There is an added urgency over Modi's successor because even though he will lead the BJP's 2029 election, he himself will step down after two years in office.

Will he hand over the baton to someone of his choice, or will the party decide on his successor is a question for later. But by pushing this decision to Modi's next term and not insisting on the 75-year cutoff, the BJP has tried to delay the inevitable.

It knows that there is no leader in its ranks who can match Modi's popularity or have his cult following, and what awaits is a return to the Vajpayee numbers, when allies called the shots. Modi himself took root under circumstances that don't prevail anymore.

And Modi's larger than life image has prevented anyone from blossoming on their own, just as it was said of Jawaharlal Nehru. The Nehru analogy is apt for another reason, too. How the Congress lurched in the years after Nehru before an unlikely candidate owned the job.

If the BJP follows the same path after Modi, you can be sure the gods have a delicious sense of irony.