Party chief responsible if MPs, MLAs don't perform well, says Gadkari

In a veiled reference to BJP president Amit Shah, Union Transport Minister Nitin Gadkari stated that the party president should take onus if MLAs and MPs are underperforming.

Gadkari's remark comes just days after he brewed a controversy with "party leadership should own up to defeat and failures" comment, which he clarified later. The BJP leader's latest remark seems to be in sharp criticism of his party's leadership.

"If one looks closely, the success of the Home Ministry today is because of their trained and skilled IAS and IPS officers. Proper training is the most important part. I believe that overall, majority of the IPS, IAS officers are clean and does a good job but if I am the party president, and my MPs and MLAs are not doing well, then who is responsible?" the 61-year-old said on Monday while addressing Intelligence Bureau officials during the 31st IB endowment lecture at Vigyan Bhawan in New Delhi.

This statement from Gadkari just a few weeks after BJP faced defeat in three Hindi heartlands'- Chhattisgarh, Madhya Pradesh and Rajasthan recently concluded assembly elections.

Post the drubbing in elections, Gadkari, on December 23, stated, "Party leadership should own up to defeat and failures", adding that "Nobody is willing to take responsibility of failure, unlike success."

Although he later clarified his statement on micro-blogging site Twitter and stated, "In the last few days, I have noticed a sinister campaign by some opposition parties and a section of the media to twist my statements and use them out of context and draw politically motivated inferences to malign me and my party. I have time and again strongly refuted such insinuations and once again condemn all these malafide and mischievous out of context reports attributed to me."

"Let me make it clear once and for all that conspiracies to create a wedge between me and the BJP leadership will never succeed. I have been clarifying my position at various forums and shall continue to do so and expose these nefarious designs of our detractors," he wrote on Twitter.