ARUN JAITLEY, a leader of India's main opposition party, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), sips coffee at his desk and breaks into a rare smile. Well he might. The past few months have seen the ruling party walloped repeatedly. Economic growth is stuttering, the public is angry over inflation, and middle-class voters are furious over a string of huge corruption scandals.

Better yet, for the opposition, the leaders of the ruling Congress Party are floundering in response. Manmohan Singh, the prime minister, by turns denies scams and is forced to act against allies or colleagues. BJP parliamentarians quip that Mr Singh seems such a liability for Congress they are anxious lest he resign. Sonia Gandhi, the matriarch holding the real power in Congress, has been away ill. Her son and likely heir looks timidly ineffective. Mr Jaitley sneers that “Rahul Gandhi is an empty suit. He is just family charisma, not coupled with wit or competence.”

And so, two years after an unexpectedly bad thumping at a general election, the BJP sees glimmers of electoral recovery. Though it was slow to grasp the intensity of public support for Anna Hazare, an anti-corruption crusader who has twice this year fasted and wrong-footed the government, the party backed him last month. Party leaders point out, too, that their own year-long protests and demands in parliament for inquiries into official scams have brought resignations and arrests.

Their strategy is paying off, although rather slowly. The BJP fared dismally in five state elections in May, and the party is mired in filth of its own, notably in a mining scandal in Karnataka state that led to arrests this week. Still, Indians typically have it against incumbents; they now seem ready to give the opposition a hearing. On September 4th the first national opinion poll after Mr Hazare's protests showed BJP support of 32%, up from 23% in May. Backing for Congress slumped by ten points to a dismal 20%.

A single poll should not be taken too literally, especially as respondents were all urban (Congress gets lots of rural votes). But it fits a pattern. A bigger poll in August found respondents in BJP-run states to be happiest with their governments. Ravi Shankar Prasad, the party's general secretary, claims internal surveys show his party gaining fast in Uttar Pradesh, a big northern state that holds an election early next year.

The BJP will not win in Uttar Pradesh, but it hopes to knock Congress into fourth place. That would hurt Mr Gandhi, who fronts his party's state election campaign. A good showing, BJP strategists say, would do much to lure allies in India's south and east, where the BJP itself has no chance. Together with other state elections, notably in BJP-run Gujarat, 2012 has the makings of a “mini-general election year”, says one party man.

Yet, as a strategy, pinning success on the back of Congress's unpopularity has flaws. The BJP has yet to tackle its own shortcomings. The most obvious is its baffling cast of leaders, who make the party a multi-headed pantomime horse. Nobody knows if the urbane Mr Jaitley, who leads the party in Parliament's upper house, or the pugnacious Sushma Swaraj, in the lower house, is really in charge. The 83-year-old L.K. Advani, who led the party in the 2009 election, also lingers, ghostlike, hoping for another pop at being prime minister. And Gujarat's hardline Hindu-nationalist, Narendra Modi, if he wins a fourth consecutive term as chief minister next year, might also claim a right to run the country.

Adding to the confusion, the party also has a president, Nitin Gatkari, pushed into his job by a powerful Hindu-revivalist group, the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, or RSS, who prance about in khaki shorts. Mr Gatkari, at least, is clear that he is “not at all interested” in leading any future BJP government. His task is to make his party electable, though his claim that “there is no lesson to be learned from the 2009 electoral defeat” suggests he has not yet given the matter much thought.

With no decision on a leader, voters struggle to detect which strand of the party predominates. Modernisers say blunt old ideas of Hindu nationalism are fading. A columnist close to the party dismisses the RSS as a “bunch of bloody fools who can't appeal to the young, especially given the growth of the middle class”. Mr Jaitley talks of the BJP as a “natural party of government” and lists economic development and national security as his party's main priorities, before mentioning “pride in our civilisation”.

For the BJP, a shift from identity politics and the party's association with high- and medium-caste Hindus makes sense for tapping voters, of whatever religion, who worry most about good governance. The model is the BJP's part in a successful ruling alliance in Bihar, which even manages to draw Muslim votes.

Yet older leaders, and the likes of Ms Swaraj, who appeal to poorer voters beyond cities, have no wish to weaken the party's strong Hindu identity. The RSS, which claims to be the world's biggest voluntary group, remains powerful, able to turn out vast numbers in Hindu-dominated states. Bashing Congress's “secularism”, and accusing the government of being soft on Islamist terror, remains a kneejerk reaction for many of the party's leaders. A revival of the BJP does not mean its transformation.