Congress leader Manish Tewari echoing similar sentiments taunted the ruling party and said the elderly distinguished gentlemen have actually lit the crackers after putting it in a very special place in the BJP. They have not come out against Narendra Modi, they have just made a comment on our strategy about Bihar. As for Jammu and Kashmir assembly polls, BJP did wrest seats from both Congress and a few smaller regional parties but the single largest party was the People’s Democratic Party, later BJP and PDP joined to form the government.
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For Mr Modi, the next clutch of state elections in Assam, West Bengal and Tamil Nadu will be critical.
The veteran camp’s bite was on display today when Ram Madhav, a general secretary and former RSS spokesperson, struck a disapproving note by saying: “They are senior leaders of our party”. Hundreds of writers, filmmakers and academics have protested the growing intolerance by returning awards they received from the government-supported bodies.
“We are fully confident about UP”, he said.
The USA based Wall Street Journal also joined in with, “Mr. Modi’s arrival in the United Kingdom, follows a large-scale defeat for his Bharatiya Janata Party in pivotal state elections in Bihar, the results of which were announced Sunday”.
“The letter penned by BJP party elders reflects what many within the BJP have said in private, but were unwilling to articulate publicly”, said Milan Vaishnav of Carnegie Endowment for global Peace.
Singh also ruled out any negative impact over the Bihar debacle on BJP’s prospects in the Assembly elections in Uttar Pradesh scheduled for 2017.
Modi is certainly bedevilled by an endless series of state elections in India but has become overly focussed on winning them to secure a majority in the country’s parliamentary upper house rather than negotiating the passage of reforms such as a consumption tax.
The brief but strongly-worded statement says that the party has been “emasculated” in the last one year and was being “forced to kowtow to a handful”.
“It has never been the culture of the party to blame any individual for the future of the party”.
Decisive defeats in successive state elections in Delhi and Bihar have resoundingly punctured the halo of invincibility that has surrounded Mr Modi and his trusted lieutenant, BJP president Amit Shah.
“How the party is standing if no one listens to the party president”, he said.
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“When the election comes, we will decide. I condemn the insinuation”, he said.
