BJP crisis worsens

Yashwant Sinha resigns, Rajnath issues gag order.

As the Bharatiya Janata Party’s trauma after its electoral defeat threatened to become a public affair and its vice-president, Yashwant Sinha, resigned from all party posts, the president, Rajnath Singh, took the unprecedented step of issuing orders that those going public with complaints about the leadership would be dealt with sternly.

In a four-page letter of resignation, which was promptly accepted by Singh, Sinha raised questions over the leadership’s “reluctance to introspect comprehensively and openly” the electoral defeat that has shaken the party.

Singh’s supporters said leaders like Sinha had been put up to write letters and create pressure in the party to ‘punish’ him. LK Advani’s supporters, on their part, blamed Singh for everything that had gone wrong in the party.

The way a senior BJP National Executive member described it, what was happening in the BJP was a clash between “the coterie advising Advani and the rest of the party, with Singh trying his best to retain some measure of authority”.

In his letter, sent to the party president yesterday, Sinha said he had expected to see a flurry of activity following the party’s defeat in the Lok Sabha elections. “It will be obvious even to the casual observer that this election has thrown up a number of issues which we can ignore only at our peril,” the letter said. “These relate to our basic tenets, our policies and programmes, the issues that we raised during elections, the campaign style of our leaders, and finally, the faces that we projected.”

Sinha added in the letter that the party was shying away from fixing responsibility for the poor showing in the recent elections. “Those who were responsible for the management of the campaign have already made their views public through interviews and articles in the media, drawn their conclusions, apportioned blame and given themselves a clean chit,” he said, referring to an article by Sudheendra Kulkarni, a member of the party’s campaign committee, and the elevation of Arun Jaitley as leader of the Opposition in the Rajya Sabha.

To these remarks, Singh’s reply, delivered through a press release, was: “The recent statements and interaction of some party leaders on various media platforms appear to have created an impression in some quarters that the party’s leadership is in disarray and is not analysing the reasons behind the defeat. This is far from the truth.” The statement said that the analysis has begun and will culminate in a detailed Chintan Baithak after the conclusion of this session of Parliament in August.

The whole process of a bloody internal unravelling and resultant haemorrhage in the BJP began with Kulkarni writing an article in a newspaper and the attacks of Arun Shourie and Jaswant Singh on accountability at a parliamentary party meeting earlier this week. Jaswant Singh — like other BJP leaders including Murli Manohar Joshi, Sinha and Shourie – made it clear he had expected Advani to quit and had not expected to see Jaitley elevated after the defeat.