The Hindu : National : BJP leadership hopeful of sorting out Munde crisis

Online edition of India's National Newspaper
Tuesday, Apr 22, 2008
ePaper | Mobile/PDA Version

National

National

BJP leadership hopeful of sorting out Munde crisis

Neena Vyas

NEW DELHI: The Bharatiya Janata Party’s central leadership here on Monday was confident that it would be able to “sort out” the crisis resulting from the resignation from all party posts by general secretary Gopinath Munde, former Deputy Chief Minister of Maharashtra and brother-in-law of slain BJP leader Pramod Mahajan.

In the morning, Mr. Munde and Maharashtra unit president Nitin Gadkari had been summoned here by the party high command.

While Mr. Gadkari turned up at the residence of party president Rajnath Singh on Monday evening — other party leaders from Maharashtra including Bal Apte and Ram Naik were present — Mr. Munde did not.

Core committee meets

Later on Monday evening, the party’s core committee met. Although the Maharashtra crisis was not on the agenda, the matter is understood to have cropped up.

Senior BJP leaders said that Leader of Opposition L.K. Advani and Mr. Singh spoke to Mr. Munde during the day and efforts were on to persuade him not to precipitate matters. He is now expected to be here on Tuesday when he was likely to meet both Mr. Advani and Mr. Singh.

Mr. Munde’s trusted friends in the party and Maharashtra legislative party leaders Eknath Khadse and Pandurang Phundkar are also here and till late on Monday evening, they were meeting party leaders.

Move for compromise

Efforts are on to work out a compromise. One view was that the appointment of Madhu Chavan as president of the party’s Mumbai unit should be kept on hold for that was the trigger that led to Mr. Munde’s resignation.

That Mr. Munde and Mr. Gadkari were at loggerheads was not the best kept secret in the BJP, but Mr. Chavan’s appointment came as the last straw for Mr. Munde who openly alleged that his party lacked democratic functioning and decisions were being made without proper consultations.

Mr. Gadkari has, however, countered this by pointing out that a three-member committee, comprising Ram Naik, Ved Prakash Goyal and Bal Apte, considered various names before zeroing in on Mr. Chavan after consulting many persons.

The party’s newly inducted MP from Maharashtra Prakash Javadekar had this to say: “We are sure the issue will be sorted out.”

BJP leaders conceded that the party cannot afford to let Mr. Munde go.

He has already shown his worth when several senior partymen from Pune and elsewhere made it clear that they too would resign from their party positions in his support.

Printer friendly page
Send this article to Friends by E-Mail

National