Naidu gets another term as BJP chief

The entire Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) national executive turned into a mutual appreciation club yesterday when Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee showered praise on party chief M Venkaiah Naidu and asked him to continue to lead the party.

Whatever Vajpayee said implied that the party would go to the polls under the "leadership of Naidu and guidance of Advani". The Prime Minister's remarks were intended to neutralise the campaign that there was a chance of changing the BJP president after the completion of the organisational elections shortly.

Vajpayee apparently reciprocated the heaps of praises showered on him at the party's national executive by describing him as pradhan mantri ho to aisa (the model Prime Minister). In essence, the executive was an exercise in focusing on the charisma of Vajpayee and his handling of governance and the economy.

In the deliberations of the political resolution, there were often references suggesting that Vajpayee's charisma and popularity had far surpassed the charm of first Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru. And this point was amplified at length by BJP general secretary Pramod Mahajan in one of his briefings.

By all indications, the BJP national executive succeeded in its strategy in projecting Vajpayee and the BJP-led National Democratic Alliance (NDA) coalition as the only political choice before people.

"The Opposition is cleaved by disunity and distrust. It is without a common leader, without a common vision and without a common agenda," the political resolution read while painting a bleak picture of the Opposition.

What emerged out of the total exercise was that the anti-Congressism was back in fashion while the BJP emerged as an able party for the governance. Even Andhra Pradesh Chief Minister N Chandrababu Naidu endorsed this in view of the fact that the Congress was the principle adversary to the BJP-TDP alliance.

But what the executive avoided discussing was the contours of the coalition within the NDA. "We did discuss it but not in specifics," confirmed the BJP president.

A BJP general secretary admitted that the coalition politics could not be discussed in such a large forum as it would evoke different views. But most significantly, the BJP leadership appeared to be reluctant to induct Kalyan Singh with an open arms in order to tighten loose ends in Uttar Pradesh.

In the executive, there was a great degree of scepticism among UP delegates about the hype created by the feel-good factor. Vinay Katiyar, UP state party chief, actually skipped the executive betraying the sense of frustration and demoralisation that the party appears to be gripped with in UP.

Similarly, the executive remained ambiguous about the possibilities of pre-poll alliance between the BJP and Jayalalithaa's AIADMK. Significantly, the Prime Minister's attack on the Congress choosing to ally with a party it had called the killers of Rajiv Gandhi, was an attack on the unprincipled nature of Congress alliances, rather than a straight condemnation of the DMK.

That there was no endorsement of the AIADMK pro-Hindu policies, let alone an intention to make the AIADMK an ally of the NDA, shows how deeply suspicious the BJP still is, of Jayalalithaa.

Though there is a strong murmuring within the BJP's Andhra Pradesh unit over the party's silence on the separate Telangana state""a demand which has captured people's imagination in the region""the party's central leadership has effectively muffled the voice of dissidence in the chorus of praise for the central government.

The BJP's political resolution was all about "hail the chief," less about programmatic unity with other partners.