Advani brings out the knives against Modi, Shah

New Delhi: The BJP High Command led by Prime Minister Narendra Modi and party president Amit Shah received a rude shock on November 10 night when senior party leader L K Advani led a revolt against Modi and Shah, asking them to accept responsibility for the Bihar election debacle.
 
The old guard led by Advani has been waiting for the right opportunity to hit back at Modi and Shah after being sidelined by the latter right from 2014, ever since Modi took over the mantle of PM candidate.

The strong statement by seven MPs from Bihar against the Modi-Shah combine is also seen as a follow-up of the statement issued on November 10.
 
 In the first challenge to Modi and Shah since the party's spectacular victory in the 2014 LS polls, party seniors Advani, Yashwant Sinha, M M Joshi and Shanta Kumar said the BJP parliamentary board's use of the expression "collective responsibility" for the Bihar Assembly elections failure  was an excuse for evading responsibility.

They accused the Modi-Shah team of destroying consensual decision-making and alleged that no lessons were learnt from the fiasco of the Delhi election. Directly targeting BJP's top duo, the statement said, "The review must not be done by the very persons who have managed and who have been responsible for the campaign in Bihar."

The statement, coming a day after the parliamentary board took the stand that the party was collectively responsible for the debacle, is the first organized challenged since Modi and Shah took over the reins. The statement was drafted in the presence of former Union minister Arun Shourie, who has been a vocal critic of the PM for several months now, and Sangh rebel K N Govindacharya.

"To say that everyone is responsible for the defeat in Bihar is to ensure no one is held responsible. It shows that those who would have appropriated credit if the party had won are bent on shrugging off responsibility for the disastrous showing in Bihar," the statement said.

Though the statement did not name either Modi or Shah, it left little room for doubt. "The principal reason for the latest defeat is the way the party has been emasculated in the last year. A thorough review must be done of the reasons for the defeat as well as of the way the party is being forced to kowtow to a handful, and how its consensual character has been destroyed," they said.
 
The main reason for the statement is the simmering discontent in the party over the concentration of decision-making under the Modi-Shah coterie.

The common complaint heard in party circles is that the BJP was being run in a "unilateral manner" with the BJP constitution being ignored. The criticism should not be dismissed as the handiwork of disgruntled leaders as they had held high posts in the government and the party, one of the signatories said.

The protest has come in response to the usual parliamentary board explanation and the defence of senior leaders like finance minister Arun Jaitley and home minister Rajnath Singh that the loss was primarily due to the superior arithmetic of the grand alliance.

Advani and Joshi are members of the BJP's 'margdarshak mandal', a body of party seniors that was seen to be have been created to move leaders out of the much more relevant parliamentary board by imposing an age cut-off of 75 years. The mandal has not met even once though it also includes the prime minister, home minister Rajnath Singh and ailing former prime minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee.

The signatories have been supported by statements from Bihar leaders like Shatrughan Sinha who said the captain of the team should take the brickbats just as he accepted praise for success. The Patna Sahib MP has been a dissident throughout the Bihar campaign, lashing out at the high command for sidelined him from party affairs.

Party MP from Bihar, Bhola Singh, has said that Modi had strayed from the focus on development. The remarks showed that defeat at the hands of Nitish Kumar and Lalu Prasad has brought to the surface the dissatisfaction with the leadership.
 
The signatories have chosen the right time to strike when the Bihar defeat has taken the sheen off the leadership of Modi and has made him vulnerable.
 
Both Advani and Joshi opposed Modi's projection as PM candidate, with the former refusing to retreat from the ring. Joshi's unhappiness increased because he had to vacate his Lok Sabha constituency of Varanasi for Modi. Advani and Joshi were not considered for positions of Speaker or in government on the ground that they were on the wrong side of the cut-off age of 75 years. They were removed from the party's top decision-making body, the parliamentary board, and moved into a body without powers called 'margdarshak mandal'.

Yashwant Sinha, whose son Jayant was given the party ticket and is Union minister of state for finance, has lately been critical of the government on a number of issues. Shanta Kumar, former CM of HP, also fell victim of the 75 years cut-off, and has felt sidelined. He had issued a statement that was critical of the fallout of Vyapam scam in Madhya Pradesh and other controversies.