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The BJP's next man in

With the question "after Advani who?" reportedly settled in favour of Rajnath Singh, it is time to ask: "Why and how Rajnath?" The former Uttar Pradesh Chief Minister figured frequently in the obsessive guessing games that followed party chief Lal Krishna Advani's exit announcement in September 2005. Yet in the backdrop of the battles within the Bharatiya Janata Party, the choice came as an anti-climax. No sound and fury, apparently no behind-the-scenes lobbying, no bombshell announcements. The tame ending is in keeping with the former Union Agriculture Minister's persona: purposeful, matter-of-fact, the least flamboyant of the party's mediocre second rung. It helped that Mr. Singh has a talent for hatchet jobs (in 1997, the BJP rid itself of Mayawati's support with his help) and is ideologically in sync with the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh. Jhandewalan needed a reassuring presence at the helm after the shock of Mr. Advani's Jinnah-appreciation and the endless tantrums of the colourful Uma Bharti. Venkaiah Naidu was too close to the outgoing chief for comfort. The next generation trio of Sushma Swaraj, Pramod Mahajan, and Arun Jaitley is mutually suspicious and therefore prone to quarrelling. Mr. Singh, on the other hand, played his cards well. He remained in the background, taking care not to appear ambitious even as his rivals grabbed the limelight. The package won favour with the Sangh. Nonetheless, the BJP's president-in-waiting appears to have made it more by a process of elimination than by standout merit.

Mr. Singh is a nuts and bolts organisational man. The finesse with which he conjured up a majority for the Kalyan Singh Government in 1997, breaking the Bahujan Samaj Party and the Congress among others, attests to this. However, the narrow vision he brings to the job can be severely limiting. Thanks to the raid on the BSP, he is at daggers drawn with Ms. Mayawati. It says something for this relationship that Rajnath Singh is second only to Mulayam Singh in the BSP chief's hit list. This does not augur well for the BJP in a State where its electoral performance nosedived — from 57 Lok Sabha seats in 1998 to 10 in 2004. In U.P. today, the contest is between the Samajwadi Party and the BSP, with the BJP a distant third. To regain its lost position in the State, the party is badly in need of a dependable ally. The BSP-BJP pact of 2002 was put in place by Prime Minister Vajpayee, overruling Mr. Singh's objections. Even their worst enemies will not deny that Mr. Vajpayee and Mr. Advani are formidable pan-Indian political leaders. In contrast, Mr. Singh is saddled with a Hindi-Hindu image dear to the RSS but unlikely to make an impact on people in most of India and especially south of the Vindhyas. This means the leadership debate in the BJP is far from over. Mr. Singh will soon be anointed as the Hindutva party's chief but who is the party's Prime Ministerial candidate?

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