With protege missing, LK Advani gets ‘blessing’ from BJP chief

BJP Nitin Gadkari on Friday said the party would not tie up the Samajwadi Party or Bahujan Samajwadi Party for the assembly elections in Uttar Pradesh next year.

Gadkari announced this during the party’s national executive meeting here on Friday.

Senior party leaders said this was due to indications of “revolutionary change” in UP polls and that the BJP’s “fortune” was getting better with each day.

The party leadership has called Uma Bharti and Sanjay Joshi — both doing leg work for BJP in Uttar Pradesh — to Delhi to discuss the poll strategy. It is speculated that the purpose of calling the duo to Delhi could also be to snub Gujarat chief minister Narendra Modi, who is believed to have expressed unhappiness over return of Joshi in the party.

However, party sources said the party leadership probably wanted to indicate to Modi that he was not bigger than the party. Modi has excused himself from the national executive citing his fasting during Navratri as a reason.

Besides Modi, former Karnataka and Uttarakhand CMs - BS Yedyurappa and Ramesh Pokhriyal Nishank - too were conspicuous by their absence. It is learnt that though Nishank was in Delhi, he chose to skip the meeting.

In his presidential speech, Gadkari said Advani is a leader with unblemished political career of 50 years and has “all the moral authority” to lead the party inthe struggle for good governance and clean politics.

“Through our Jan Chetna Yatra we will try to focus on multi-sector reforms like administrative reforms, electoral reforms, judicial reforms and political reforms,” Gadkari said.

He said through the nation-wide yatra of Advani commencing from Bihar on October 11, good governance and clean politics will now become the focus of public discourse.

The BJP, however, downplayed the reported differences between Advani and Modi, and said reports of Modi being unhappy with the yatra were wrong.

“It is not true that Modi is unhappy. He fasts during Navratra and so is not attending the national executive,” the party’s chief spokesperson Ravi Shankar Prasad said.

However, he admitted that the party had requested Modi to attend, a point made by Gadkari on Thursday.

Meanwhile, BJP leaders close to Modi spoke in his favour. Party Rajya Sabha MP and Gujarat in-charge Balbir Punj said: “If he (Modi) gets a chance, he will be the best Prime Minister in the history of the country.”

Asked if Modi or Advani would make a better Prime Minister, Punj said, “I do not know this. I will not make any comparisons. That the people of the nation will decide.”