Nine years after the then RSS Chief KS Sudarshan exhorted Atal Behari Vajpayee and LK Advani to make way for younger leaders, the generational change has been ruthlessly effected by the BJP. Vajpayee has retired from public life owing to ill-health but for the other stalwarts of his generation — LK Advani, Murli Manohar Joshi and Jaswant Singh — the “generational change” has come in the form of public humiliation during the ongoing elections.
These slights have coincided with the projection of Gujarat CM Narendra Modi as the first among equals in the party.
The Modi-Rajnath Singh-Amit Shah triumvirate has left no scope for any doubt about how the BJP intends to tackle veterans who still want to stay relevant in politics. The latest case in point is that while both Modi and party president Rajnath Singh rode roughshod over dissent from incumbent MPs to push their candidature from Varanasi and Lucknow seats respectively, Advani was not accorded the same courtesy.
Despite Advani expressing in not-so-subtle terms his intent to shift from Gandhinagar to Bhopal in this election, Rajnath presided over the BJP’s Central Election Committee (CEC) that decided that Advani will have to contest from Gandhinagar. Advani’s relocation to Bhopal would have been interpreted as a motion of distrust against Modi and the party decided to force the veteran’s hand.
Without bothering to consult with the senior leader, the CEC deputed Thawar Chand Gehlot, JP Nadda and Shahnawaz Hussein to publicly announce that Advani will contest from Gandhinagar.
No local resistance Incidentally, in Advani’s case, there was no local resistance to his candidature from Bhopal.
The sitting MP from Bhopal, Kailash Joshi, had declared that he was willing to vacate the seat for Advani. Madhya Pradesh CM Shivraj Singh Chouhan too backed Advani’s candidature, an intent reflecting in the options column left blank for the Bhopal seat in the list of aspirants sent to the CEC by the State. The ground was clearly paved for Advani’s relocation to Bhopal.
However, the CEC pushed Advani’s name because a public expression of distrust — that Advani is not confident of the party cadre in Gandhinagar working for his victory under Modi’s leadership — would have shown Modi in very poor light. In short, the BJP bullied Advani because Modi cannot lose face.
Same treatment The same treatment was meted out to Murli Manohar Joshi, who was shunted out of Varanasi to make way for Modi. Joshi, the sitting MP from Varanasi, had even inaugurated his election office in his constituency. z“Joshiji is a mature politician. If the PM candidate wants to contest from his seat, he would have gracefully vacated it. All you needed to do was to ask him.
“But there was no consultation and news about him being removed from Varanasi started appearing in the media without any process of consultation. This is not the appropriate way of dealing with a party elder,” said a BJP leader.
In the end, Joshi had to swallow his pride and accept the inevitable. The fate of the BJP’s third senior leader — former Foreign Minister Jaswant Singh — is hanging in the balance. Singh was elected in 2009 from Darjeeling.
This time, that seat was allocated to SS Ahluwalia with the expectation that Jaswant will be awarded the Barmer seat from his home state, Rajasthan.
But in the Rajasthan list, candidates for all the other 24 seats were announced but Barmer.