BJP's confident despite infighting

Sniping at the senior leadership of the party has reached a new high in the BJP in Karnataka. For the moment, there is a truce, but the party knows the damage it could do ahead of the polls

For a party (and government) that has barely five months left to face an Assembly election, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) appears remarkably confident about its plans for Karnataka. Despite the general expectation that Union Home Minister Amit Shah would inaugurate the state executive earlier this month, he did not show up and instead elected to travel to Gujarat and Jammu to hold meetings with party office-bearers and BJP leaders. He sent General Secretary Arun Singh to the Karnataka meeting. This left local leaders cold: Most of them left the venue after lunch, with Chief Minister Basavaraj Bommai himself skipping