The Hindu : New Delhi News : BJP does little soul-searching on poll defeat

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Tuesday, Jan 06, 2009
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New Delhi

BJP does little soul-searching on poll defeat

Gaurav Vivek Bhatnagar

NEW DELHI: Completely humbled by the Congress in the recent Delhi Assembly elections, the Bharatiya Janata Party now appears to be shying away from introspecting over the causes for the drubbing.

Rather than calling all its candidates who had contested the elections to find out the reasons for the party’s poor performance, a meeting of 16 district presidents was convened by BJP general secretary Ananth Kumar on Sunday. The meeting was also attended by the party’s vice-president Bal Apte and State general secretary Vijay Sharma.

It is learnt that prior to the meeting, the district presidents had been briefed on what should be said. Also the presence of Mr. Sharma meant that the district presidents were not able to open their hearts completely as they knew that whatever was spoken by them would not remain confidential and would be conveyed to both the Leader of the Opposition in the Assembly, Vijay Kumar Malhotra, and State unit president Harsh Vardhan.

No wonder just one district president, who is also in charge of a cell of the Delhi BJP, openly declared that one of the main reasons for the party’s defeat was that it chose to project Prof. Malhotra as its Chief Ministerial candidate. Though attempts were made by one of the members to silence him, the district president is learnt to have spoken for about 15 minutes on the various others reasons – such as non-cooperation by Councillors who were declined tickets – as one of the reasons for the defeat.

According to sources, the manner in which the meeting was conducted left a lot to be desired. “That the district presidents were called shows that the idea was not to identify the cause of the defeat but more to complete a formality. Under every district president there are four to five Assembly segments and they cannot give the complete picture as their area gets fragmented. It would have been better had the party called all its candidates, both who had won and those lost, to know the possible reasons for their performance. But that would have meant calling 70 people in place of the 16 with whom the exercise was completed,” they said.

Incidentally, the Sangh leadership is also keen that the BJP puts its house in order ahead of the Lok Sabha elections.

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