Lack Of Experience May Show

He was so wedded to the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh tradition of serving the organisation that he didn't want to leave the party. But once the erstwhile president of the Bharatiya Janata Party was made a minister, his face was wreathed in smiles.

Jana Krishnamurthy, who has been given the law and justice portfolio, was a party functionary in Tamil Nadu with his sole claim to fame being that when senior RSS and BJP leaders were in Chennai, they would stay with him. Admittedly, Krishnamurthy has served the party - as it is in Tamil Nadu - unswervingly for nearly 40 years. However, he could make no great political contribution to the growth and development of the BJP, so much so that former BJP general secretary Govindacharya had to be sent to Chennai to assist in building the party in the mid-1990s, when the BJP realised that it needed to concentrate on the southern states to build an all-India presence in order to form the government.

Jana Krishnamurthy was made party president after the Tehelka scandal, which took the then party president Bangaru Laxman in its wake. However, after he took over, the party lost power in state after state in the last Assembly elections, necessitating his replacement.

As a former BJP president, Krishnamurthy joins the ranks of Murli Manohar Joshi, rather than LK Advani or Atal Bihari Vajpayee, with an emphasis on disciplined functioning, rather than charismatic leadership. Krishnamurthy and present BJP president Venkiah Naidu have crossed swords in the past, so the appointments made by Krishnamurthy are likely to be revised by Naidu sooner than later.

As Krishnamurthy has never been a minister, it is hard to judge what he will do as one. He will have an able deputy in Ravishankar Prasad, who is a talented and practising lawyer. However, whether changes will be made in the ministry of law and justice that Arun Jaitely had put into motion remains to be seen.

Sahib Singh