Crisis in saffron party
New Delhi: The BJP plunged into a crisis on Monday, barely a day after it named Narendra Modi to lead its campaign in the next Lok Sabha elections, with the veteran LK Advani declaring he was quitting all major party posts and accusing most BJP leaders of pursuing ‘personal agendas’. The party rejected his resignation.
Advani’s stunning decision, if not reversed, is bound to have a bearing on the acceptance of Modi as the BJP’s Prime Ministerial candidate in the 2014 Lok Sabha elections.
By evening, the BJP’s top leaders were huddled with Advani at his residence, trying to persuade him to change his mind.
With its rift out in the open, an embarrassed BJP hurriedly called a meeting of its parliamentary board, one of the three bodies from which Advani resigned, the others being the national executive and the election committee.
“The parliamentary board decided to reject the resignation of Shri Advaniji,” party president Rajnath Singh told reporters after a meeting of the board at his official residence here.
Rajnath Singh said he will not accept the resignation under any circumstance.
Some of the leaders went to meet Advani, 86, after the parliamentary board meeting to persuade him to withdraw his resignation.
From Gujarat, Modi made a passionate appeal to Advani to take back his resignation and appealed to the elder not to disappoint ‘lakhs’ of party activists. But Advani refused to budge.
Advani, who helped the party to grow from an also-ran into a powerful entity in the 1980s and gave it its hardline Hindutva ideology, had failed to dissuade the BJP from elevating the ambitious Gujarat Chief Minister to the chief campaigner of the party.
In a stinging letter to Rajnath Singh that was made public, Advani said he found it ‘difficult to reconcile either with the current functioning of the party or the direction in which it is going’.
The three-para letter made no reference to Modi, who for years enjoyed Advani’s patronage, but its tone made it evident that the resignation was linked to his elevation at a party meet in Goa on Sunday.
The decision to name Modi head of the election campaign committee would have made the Gujarat Chief Minister – the BJP’s best known Hindutva icon – its virtual face in the Lok Sabha elections.
Advani, who led the BJP in the 2009 general elections which it lost, kept away from the Goa national executive meet citing poor health.
“For some time I have been finding it difficult to reconcile either with the current functioning of the party, or the direction in which it is going,” said Advani, increasingly overshadowed in the BJP by second-rung leaders.
“Most leaders of ours are now concerned just with their personal agendas,” said Advani, in one of the harshest condemnation of BJP leaders by anyone within, bringing its internal rift out in the open.
Advani remains an ordinary member of the BJP. (IANS)