Narendra Tandon, in charge of CM candidate's poll campaign, quits and then withdraws resignation
Narendra Tandon, who was given charge of organising Delhi chief ministerial candidate Kiran Bedi's campaign, may have been an insconspicuous BJP worker till now.
But, on Monday morning, just as the party was pulling out all the stops for the February 7 Delhi election, he hogged the limelight as he resigned over Bedi's "dictatorial" style of functioning. Party leaders were dismissive, playing down the controversy and describing Tandon as an inconsequential member, even as they went into damage control mode.
Hours later Tandon withdrew his resignation, but only after party president Amit Shah's intervention. "Union minister Dharmendra Pradhan spoke to me first and then took me to meet the party chief who asked me to get back to work. He said the party needed good workers," Tandon told dna later.
After meeting Shah, who had cancelled his trip to Lucknow apparently because of preoccupation with the Delhi election and was at the BJP headquarters, Tandon told reporters that he had taken an "emotional decision" on his resignation and was taking it back.
But, till over half an hour after that, at the party's Delhi state office, less than two kms away, the BJP's state president Satish Upadhyay was still unaware that he had returned to the party fold. He told reporters that Tandon's resignation had been accepted, indicating the disconnect between the party's central leadership and state unit.
"I have been a dedicated party worker for 30 years and have worked with the similar dedication for the past 11 days. But I can no longer take the dictatorial working style of Bedi any more," Tandon said in his resignation letter, according to party sources.
However, he said he had no complaints against the party and that the matter was now closed. Tandon, who was party of the campaign committee headed by Anil Jain, was a Delhi University Students' Union president as an ABVP member in the 1990s.
Tandon is understood to have been irked by Bedi's instructions and dictating her campaign route.
His resignation came on a day when the BJP was battling on another front -- the cartoon ad campaign which uses the term "upadravi (arsenist) gotra". The AAP accused the BJP of targeting Arvind Kejriwal on caste lines and threatened to go the EC, while the BJP rejected the charge saying it was targeting him for being an anarchist.
It also came in the thick of the campaign, when the BJP is banking on every worker and leader in its battle with AAP, which had shattered its hopes of capturing Delhi in 2013 assembly election.
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