Union Commerce and Industry Minister Anand Sharma on Monday said it was for the public to see how the Bharatiya Janata Party is treating their senior leaders, some of whom were upset with the functioning of the party.
"Well, it is within public display, the kind of treatment they have meted out to their seniors, as well as to their leaders." Sharma said.
The denial of ticket to Jaswant Singh, who for years has been one of the better known leaders of the Bharatiya Janata Party, has exposed growing discontent within the party over denial of tickets to senior leaders for the Lok Sabha polls.
The Central Election Committee of the BJP decided on Friday not to give in to Jaswant Singh's demand to grant him a ticket to contest the general elections from Barmer.
Upset over the denial of a Lok Sabha ticket, Jaswant Singh today filed his nomination papers as an Independent candidate from Barmer in Rajasthan.
BJP leader Sushma Swaraj, who heads the opposition in the Lok Sabha, has expressed sadness over the denial of a ticket to Jaswant Singh.
The rejection of Jaswant Singh's request comes soon after another leader Lal Krishna Advani was persuaded to contest from Gandhinagar, instead of his preferred choice of Bhopal.
Earlier, Advani had been sulking over being fielded from Gandhinagar in the Lok Sabha elections, and it took the top brass of the BJP and the RSS to intervene in order to request him to change his decision.
Advani had not so long ago criticized the Narendra Modi dominated poll campaign as being one sided and asked that other tall leaders like Sushma Swaraj were capable enough to pull crowds and stressed on the fact that campaigning should be a joint effort.
Another BJP veteran leader Murli Manohar Joshi's who is the incumbent Lok Sabha MP from Varanasi has been replaced by Narendra Modi. The BJP has pitted Joshi against Congress's Sriprakash Jaiswal for the Kanpur seat.
At an earlier meeting of the BJP's Central Election Committee (CEC), Joshi had questioned the party's leadership on the issue and sought to know why media reports were speculating on his seat, and why he was not consulted on this issue. In the end, he had to give in.
