What can crash even more than a stock-market-bad-day Sensex? What has exhibited the most puzzling and hard-to-make-sense-of volatility in recent times? Answer to both questions: the BJP’s policy positioning. India’s main Opposition party got a breather from its rival ruling party only recently, having been spared the prospect of early elections when it is dangerously unprepared for an electoral test. What does it do to take advantage of this? It makes the most ill thought out of statements on the stock market. The BJP call for a JPC probe into Sensex churning makes no sense. If the party is saying some people are moving the market in illegal concert, it should come out with credible prima facie proof first and then demand a JPC. But, of course, it cannot produce any such proof because thousands of market observers, who have a real stake in the market not getting hijacked, have not caught the whiff of a scandal as yet. The BJP has asked who gained from SEBI’s statement on participatory notes and why so much market wealth was ‘wiped out’. The answer is some people gained and some people lost, and that’s how it is in markets. Unless the BJP can back its allegations with substance, its observations on the market will rank among the most forgettable.

This lack of substance has been the defining feature of the BJP’s post-2004 election life. It turned hostile on VAT even though so much work was done by the NDA on the tax. The patent bill was passed with the Left’s help because the BJP rendered itself irrelevant in the parliamentary debate. BJP leaders have never found an occasion to maturely look at the country’s economic profile. It was eager to support Mamata Banerjee’s Luddite policy on industrialisation. Some of its party leaders openly criticised India’s vote against Iran at the IAEA. The nuclear deal and the BJP’s position on it is, of course, a well-known case.

The party only seems to come to life when a certain kind of issue comes to the fore. Thus the faux pas by the Congress on the Ram Sethu affidavit gave the party some enthusiasm. But such controversies don’t always have a long shelf life. Should there be a commission to investigate what’s wrong with the BJP?