Upbeat and aggressive till last week, the BJP has suddenly been put on the defensive.
NEW DELHI: Upbeat and aggressive till last week, the BJP has suddenly been put on the defensive.
This has happened despite concerted efforts of the team entrusted with the responsibility of formulating and executing the plan to take the BJP to victory under the leadership of NDA prime ministerial candidate LK Advani. And, the trouble seems to have origins in the party's Rajput lobby.
The party is hard put to give satisfactory explanation justifying its bid to offer prime ministership to any UNPA candidate if they helped bring down the UPA government. That there was such a bid was admitted by BJP leader Jaswant Singh in Advani’s presence, and the party must have anticipated this when he came to address the media, since the topic was, and still is, hot.
Minutes earlier, Advani had talked about the Manmohan Singh government having lost all moral authority and credibility as a result of the “unprincipled deals” it had made with the Samajwadi Party resulting in “yesterday’s adversaries” — the Congress and the SP — becoming “today’s allies”. And a day ago, BJP spokesmen had termed the story to this effect, based on reports Samajwadi Party leader Amar Singh’s disclosure, as “pure fiction”.
The plight the Rajput leader has put them in has left a bad taste in the Advani camp’s mouth, even if Jaswant was simply trying to use the Rajput connection in approaching Amar Singh to manage a ‘masterstroke’ for the party. There were hints of the role of a top Rajput leader in the attempted coup.
BJP leaders like Venkaiah Naidu have said Jaswant Singh had gone on his own and others did not know, as “a senior leader like him did not need to get prior sanction”.
There have also been persistent reports of differences of Advani’s team with the other prominent Rajput leader in the party, its president, Rajnath Singh. There were murmurs Rajnath excused himself from the event organised at Bhopal for releasing the Hindi version of Advani’s biography. This was allegedly because he was not called for the launch of election campaign at Advani’s election rally at Kanpur.
Significantly, there are no Rajput leaders in Advani’s team. Moreover, there have been murmurs of RSS being in favour of getting a Brahmin to head the BJP. At a time when the party needs cohesiveness, there appears to be a lack of consultation among its leaders who keep going off on divergent tracks.
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