Naidu stays for now, BJP sets up teams to overhaul party machine

MANDATE 2004

It was a despondent-looking Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) that went into two mid-morning meetings on Friday, one with Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee, who met the BJP parliamentary board, and another for party office bearers only, which was called by party President M Venkaiah Naidu.

According to highly-placed BJP sources, there are no immediate plans to replace Naidu whose "hard work" has been commended by one and all, including Vajpayee.

Naidu is expected to re-constitute the national executive and team of office-bearers, inducting several new faces and expanding the team. A similar exercise is planned at the state level too.

A meeting of the national executive to analyse the poll outcome and take stock of the post-poll political scenario is also scheduled for next month.

All eyes though are focussed on whether party General Secretary Pramod Mahajan would be asked to resign their post.

"Absolutely not," said Naidu, "we are a political party based on ideological principles, elections are not lost due to the work of one man, we all take collective responsibility for the defeat," he said.

While there was veiled criticism of Mahajan for the party's high-tech campaign, the looming Assembly polls in Maharashtra  (barely four months away) saved him from any serious criticism.

Vajpaye praised Mahajan for his hard work during the elections despite the fact that the desired results could not be achieved. 

However, at the meeting of party office bearers, attended by senior leaders like outgoing Deputy Prime Minister L K Advani, the decision on holding early elections was questioned.

"The wisdom of the move was questioned and will be a factor in locating the reasons for defeat," said a senior leader.

According to sources in the party, the rout the party faced in Uttar Pradesh, the party's worst ever performance there, was being blamed on infighting. 

"The Uttar Pradesh tally is being seriously looked at. The fight there occurred because of Kalyan Singh's entry, this made Rajnath Singh and Kalraj Mishra insecure about what was till now their fiefdom. Everywhere, because of this, the Samajwadi Party gained at our expense,'' said a senior party leader.

Although Naidu honestly admitted to being absolutely surprised by Thursday's results, he preferred to keep mum on the reasons for the debacle.

"We have asked our state units to do a detailed survey on what went wrong after which we will study it at the centre," he said. Naidu admitted though that regional factors diluted the Atal feel good effect.

While no decision has yet been made on who is to be the leader of the Opposition, efforts are on to persuade a reluctant Vajpayee to don the mantle.

With senior leaders including Advani and Arun Jaitley free from government responsibilities, the party hopes to enlist their services "effectively" towards strengthening the organisation, the sources said.

"We are now taking the debacle as a break during which we would galvanise the party which has been demoralised to some extent due to the unexpected defeat," said a senior BJP leader.

Though the Sangh Parivar has blamed the party's "dilution" of its core Hindutva agenda to be one of the key factors for the debacle, the party would be pursuing the "development" agenda more vigorously in the coming days, the sources said.

Interestingly, except for a telephonic conversation between RSS joint General Secretary Madan Das Devi and Naidu, there has been no interaction between the leadership of the two organisations after the poll debacle.

The issues being debated among party leaders include the "communication gap" between the leaders and the cadres, the overkill of the 'feel good' and 'India  Shining' campaigns, "miscalculations" in the choice of alliance partners and the issuance of 'fatwa' in the party's support by Shahi Imam of Delhi's Jama Masjid which apparently angered the core supporters.