Another veteran leader who spoke on condition of anonymity, said, “Our leaders think they are leading a one-many army”.
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The problem is this should also be the prime minister’s job especially since he has spent so much time travelling the world and talking up the potential for a new India to produce Chinese-style annual growth rates if it can pull foreign investment into its undersized manufacturing sector.
Without naming Prime Minister Narendra Modi and party president Amit Shah, the party veterans held these leaders responsible for the defeat.
The veterans – LK Advani, Yashwant Sinha, Murli Manohar Joshi and Shanta Kumar – have demonstrated by holding a series of meetings today they are in no mood to stop pressuring the party on their demand that accountability be fixed for the party’s humiliating defeat in the Bihar assembly election. The veterans thwarted this maneuver emphatically, nailing “the way the party has been emasculated in the last year” as the biggest reason behind the defeat.
Defense manufacturing is expected to be the “prime focus” of Modi’s visit to Britain, he said. Shanta Kumar is a former Himachal Pradesh chief minister who has been critical of Modi in the past.
But most believe that this missive may spur the leadership and the party to undergo a course correction: less bombast and hubris while campaigning for votes, listening to and promoting more local leaders, and returning to good old fashioned realpolitik of political give and take.
Sources said union minister Ravi Shankar Prasad and former Delhi mayor Arti Mehra were also present at Advani’s residence when Sinha reached there. The RSS, meanwhile, is keeping a close watch on developments in the BJP.
The response of key figures in BJP’s central leadership has been interesting. The duo at the centre of the storm, Modi and Shah, are yet to speak publicly about the defeat.
It added that a review “must not be done by the very persons who have managed and who have been responsible for the campaign in Bihar”.
“See, the Bihar result was unexpected”. A few of his colleagues, however, have not been equally kind to the veterans.
Gadkari, who two days ago had suggested taking disciplinary action against those who made “irresponsible” statements “damaging” the party’s image, dismissed suggestions that he was targeting the elders who had issued a stinging statement a day earlier.
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Sunday’s loss in Bihar, India’s third most populous and poorest state, comes after a similar defeat in Delhi and is the most significant setback for Modi since he won a crushing victory in a general election previous year.
