Visibly annoyed with its aging dinosaurs and amidst the aspiration scuffles taking its toll in the party, BJP's old turk Govind Govindacharya is scratching the wounds again. The Babri mosque demolition was the “failure of the saffron leadership..to gauge the mood of the karsevaks…a glaring example of contradiction between cadre-based and mass-based politics”, says the expat.

An occupying contradiction is entailed in Maloy Krishna Dhar's book. Maloy, a former IB Joint Director, does not agree that the incident was a spontaneous misadventure of the mob. He maintains that it was engineered months in advance by top leaders of RSS, BJP and VHP, a choreographed pralaya nritya with the vandalism handled by the Shiv Sena while Sangh leaders added fuel with their “irresponsible rhetoric”. Another occupying observation made by the author is about the late Prime Minister P.V.Narsimha Rao's piteous handling of the issue, who, according to the author, “had regained some jest for life and had started dreaming of short-circuiting the Nehru-Gandhi dynasty.”