Not the flavour of the moment

A Bharatiya Janata Party candidate for an Assembly by-election in Madhya Pradesh has put up hoardings with photographs of himself, former prime minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee and a beaming Chief Minister Shivraj Singh Chouhan. Curiously, neither Prime Minister Narendra Modi nor BJP President Amit Shah finds a place on the hoardings. In the run-up to the Bihar Assembly elections last year, only Modi and Shah were featured on the hoardings that the BJP erected across the state; photos of Bihar leaders of the BJP-led alliance were included as an afterthought, when the party sensed it was losing ground. The BJP and its allies were trounced in the state's Assembly elections. On Tuesday, only a few news channels showed live visuals of Modi's public meeting in Coimbatore; a few months back almost all the channels were showing him live.