At the New Delhi meeting Modi openly hinted at his ambitions by pointing to the virtues of having a ‘single leader’ who could turn the tide
Mixed messages have emerged from the just-concluded three-day meeting of the BJP national council, the last convening of the body before the next general election, which officially sat to endorse the appointment of Rajnath Singh as party president following the ignominious ouster of Nitin Gadkari in the shadow of a corruption scandal.
It is evident that the national council, which is a gathering of the party’s functionaries from the states, saw a strong lobby at work for Gujarat chief minister Narendra Modi to be officially declared the BJP’s candidate for Prime Minister. Mr Modi’s own keenness in this regard is no secret. At the New Delhi meeting he openly hinted at his ambitions by pointing to the virtues of having a “single leader” who could turn the tide.
To buttress the claim, the Gujarat leader dredged up names from the past — Lal Bahadur Shastri and Atal Behari Vajpayee. But these sterling examples do not help his case. Both were hugely popular — some might say loved — national figures valued even by their opponents well before they took office as PM. In contrast, Mr Modi, deeply mired in communal controversy, seems to many — not just ideological adversaries — to be pushing his own case with unappealing haste. His claim to distinction is some data on the development front, which was challenged by Madhya Pradesh chief minister Shivraj Singh Chouhan in his mild-mannered address to the national council.
There were other signs of the ticking-off Mr Modi got. BJP patriarch Lal Krishna Advani spoke of the need to engineer an “NDA-plus” situation to defeat the Congress. Effectively, this means the Gujarat CM’s candidature cannot be advanced for fear of losing even some existing NDA allies, in particular Nitish Kumar’s Janata Dal (United). It is possible that senior BJP leaders would prefer to trip up
Mr Modi even if the latter enjoys rank-and-file support. So, all said and done, the issue is turning out to be a thorny problem for the party.
Far from being a reflection of the political situation in the country, the Gujarat leader’s speech at the national council took on the form of an ungainly — and indecorous — attack on Congress president Sonia Gandhi and her family. Not to say of others, many in the BJP will find this unpalatable. This was certainly not the Vajpayee idiom which Mr Modi is trying so desperately hard to make count on his side. All in all, it is a tricky situation that the BJP has manoeuvred itself into.
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