Nitin Gadkari’s team was supposed to pull the BJP out of its rut and prepare the party for the post Vajpayee-Advani era. But the team declared on Tuesday is little more than a balancing act aimed at keeping the various factions in the party happy.
While Gadkari has included Vijay Goel in the list of powerful general secretaries to satisfy former president Rajnath Singh, Ananth Kumar has been made the senior-most general secretary and secretary of the party’s highest decision-making body, the parliamentary board, to keep the Advani faction quiet.
States such as Orissa and Himachal Pradesh, which had not been given good representation earlier, have been given a general secretary’s post each at the expense of Uttar Pradesh (UP), which has been ignored on this count.
The argument is, since the party had been wiped out in Orissa and since Himachal was a small state, they needed representation. Moreover, the last president, Rajnath, was from UP and his team had a general secretary from the state.
Gadkari’s team has an embarrassingly rich presence of RSS
men. While Ram Lal has been retained as general secretary and given two assistants loaned from the RSS, Saudan Singh has been accommodated despite a not-so-impressive record.
Muralidhar Rao, who had been brought to the BJP from the RSS with great expectations, however, had to be content with a secretary’s post. Varun Gandhi’s inclusion has also been at the behest of the RSS.
A lot has been written about the glamour brigade in the team — film actresses Hema Malini, Kirron Kher and Vani Tripathi and cricketer Navjot Singh Sidhu. The fact, however, remains that Gadkari has done a decent job of choosing from the talent available to him.
“He wanted some young people to project a new dynamic in the party and he had choose them from the available pool,” a source close to the BJP president said.
Gadkari seems to have realised that in Delhi, he will need the cooperation of powerful national leaders, despite the unconditional blessings of the RSS. His team reflects this reality.
His speeches in Indore about a new, pragmatic start notwithstanding, Gadkari has started from where Rajnath left off.
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