BJP meet starts with Nitin Gadkari’s clarion call to end factionalism

It took only a month-and-a-half for new BJP president Nitin Gadkari to concede that the massive infighting in the party was not due to “ordinary workers” but senior leaders of the party.

In the party’s national executive being held in Indore, Gadkari comprehensively ticked off seniors who in the last few years seemed to have put their “individual careers” before the party’s interest.

Quite clearly, even his short stint at the Centre seems to have convinced Gadkari that infighting is the most serious challenge facing the party. With most of his speech devoted to this subject he also clarified that his mandate was to strengthen the organisation, not just to win elections but to do it with BJP’s core values intact.

The party’s petty squabbles over pelf and territory had haemorraged it from within, especially since the debacle in the last Lok Sabha polls. In plain speaking, unrivalled since LK Advani’s speech in Chennai asking the BJP to carve a different identity from the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), Gadkari ticked off seniors in the party to “command respect not demand it”.

“Try to make your own shadow bigger, not to cut someone else down to size,” he said at an internal meeting. “There should be only one criteria for ticket distribution — winning capacity. Tickets should not be sought for loyalists. Accountability in all cases must be fixed for electoral defeats,” he said.

The allusion was clearly to Jharkhand and the electoral debacle faced by the BJP in that state. Though it came back as a coalition partner of the Jharkhand Mukti Morcha, the BJP’s performance was below par in the recent assembly poll. The party’s former president Rajnath Singh was said to have favoured one group over another.

Even as Gadkari was doing his tough talking, former Rajasthan chief minister Vasundhara Raje, whose running feud with Rajnath Singh is legendary, failed to make an appearance at the national executive. And while senior leaders found their air-conditioned tents draughty, Prakash Javadekar was the only spokesperson of the party not to have an individual cutout in the national executive campus.

Like predecessor Rajnath, Gadkari said the BJP president’s job was like that of King Vikramaditya, who had to be fair to all.