BJP holds conference of its losers

'Conspiracy' by rivals joining hands cited as a reason for loss

It has been a lonely month and a half for 146 men and women who contested the 2014 Lok Sabha elections as Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) candidates. When most of the 428 candidates BJP fielded in the elections won, these were the unfortunate oneswho lost the elections. On Thursday, BJP top leadership invited them to a conference - to tell them that the party acknowledged their hard work, to give an ear to their complaints and to encourage those from Odisha and West Bengal to build on party's improved showing in these two states.

Party president Rajnath Singh, organising secretary Ram Lal, senior leaders Ananth Kumar and JP Nadda sat through the day listening to party candidates, and the reasons for their defeat.

Rudra Narayan Pany, BJP candidate from Dhenkanal in Odisha, blamed "local corporate and business groups and the Odisha state government to have conspired" to engineer his defeat.

Pany lost to Biju Janata Dal's Tathagata Satpathy by nearly 1.4 lakh votes. The party leaders, however, had encouraging words for Pany, lauding him for securing 3.15 lakh votes.

Dilip Kumar Jaiswal, BJP candidate from Kishanganj in Bihar, attributed his defeat to the fact that the Janata Dal (United) candidate Akhtarul Imam gave in without a fight to facilitate the victory of Congress' Md Asrarul Haque. Jaiswal lost by close to two lakh votes but was congratulated for having secured nearly three lakh votes from the overwhelmingly Muslim constituency.

Former minister Shahnawaz Hussain explained to the gathering how he lost his Bhagalpur seat by a "mere" 9,500 votes. O Rajagopal came in for praise for giving Congress' Shashi Tharoor a scare in the Thiruvananthapuram seat, which the BJP candidate lost by a little over 15,000 votes. Another prominent loser who attended the meeting was D Purandeshwari, while some others like music composer Bappi Lahiri and ministers Arun Jaitley and Smriti Irani skipped the meeting.

Some of the candidates complained about resource crunch, lack of support from the party organisation, and sundry other reasons. Their rivals having joined hands to ensure their defeat was commoner of the reasons. But most were pleased that the party had at least bothered to remember them and the senior leadership took out time to engage with them.

According to Hussain, party president Rajnath Singh told the gathering that BJP had emerged as the biggest. He said he could think of only the Congress in the immediate aftermath of independence to have been as strong. He asked the attendees to not lose heart as their party had a government at the Centre.

"Rajnath ji asked them to not lose heart, to continue working among people since those who voted for them would have expectations as the party is in power at the Centre," Hussain said.

Singh also appealed to these losing candidates to help the party contest assembly elections with renewed vigour, particularly assembly elections in West Bengal where the party has secured unprecedented vote share. Singh told the gathering that they should start working for 2019 Lok Sabha elections.

This was the first such 'conference of losers' that the party has held. Large majority of losing candidates were from states where BJP has traditionally been weak like Odisha, West Bengal, Tamil Nadu, Kerala and northeast.