 "BJP leader Shanta Kumar after a meeting with senior party leader Murli Manohar Joshi at his residence in New Delhi")
Veteran leaders of Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) met on Thursday and discussed the washout of winter session of the Parliament and the suspension of the party’s Lok Sabha member Kirti Azad.
Seniors L K Advani, Yashwant Sinha and Shanta Kumar met at the residence of Murli Manohar Joshi. The four had met on November 10, after the party’s defeat in the Bihar assembly polls, and had issued a critical statement, wanting accountability to be fixed for that setback. That neither elicited any reply from the party nor led to any corrective action.
Hence, the mood at Thursday’s meeting was more of resignation — that there words were unlikely to have an impact. This, sources said, was the primary reason the group didn’t issue any statement after the meeting. A senior even said it was a coincidence that the four had met a day after Azad was suspended for “anti-party activities” and for “colluding” with the Congress and Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) to harm the BJP’s image.
There was a sense among the seniors that the current leadership shouldn’t have made the Azad episode a “prestige issue”. There was concern about the possibility that people might perceive the suspension as intolerance towards whistleblowers. However, the leaders also agreed that the party was left with little option but to suspend Azad, once Finance Minister Arun Jaitley moved court to file criminal and civil defamation cases against Delhi Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal and other AAP leaders.
“We met. We had tea,” Shanta Kumar told reporters after the meeting, without giving any details.
Sources said the leaders agreed that the entire episode, from Azad’s allegations about financial irregularities in Delhi’s cricket body to his subsequent suspension, had given an opportunity to BJP’s opponents to criticise the party. They also discussed how Parliament had failed to discuss important issues like the World Trade Organization talks in Nairobi and the climate change agreement in Paris.
Azad had sought intervention of the ‘margdarshak mandal’, comprising Advani, Joshi, Atal Behari Vajpayee, Prime Minister Narendra Modi and Home Minister Rajnath Singh. The ‘mandal’ was formally announced by BJP president Amit Shah after he took over the party in August 2014. That mentor group is seen as a diplomatic way to drop the dissident seniors from the BJP’s Parliamentary Board, its highest decision-making body.
The party has downplayed the meeting of veterans, saying their suggestions were always welcome. “They are our seniors. It is under them that we have reached here. The party has always welcomed their suggestions. Due to their blessings and their work, the party has reached here,” party secretary Shrikant Sharma said. He added the Modi government had zero tolerance towards corruption.
In Ahmedabad, Azad sought the PM’s intervention into his suspension. Azad said he would seek a court-monitored probe into the affairs of the Delhi cricket body. The former cricketer said he’d file a public interest suit on the issue and warned that people “will be in trouble”. He said his allegations were not against any individual and asked what wrong he’d done by raising the issue of corruption.
Another BJP politician, Subramanian Swamy, appeared on micro blogging site Twitter and questioned the decision on Azad. Swamy asked whether cricket fell within the purview of party discipline and said he’d assist Azad in drafting the reply to the suspension letter. “I have every right to assist him. I don’t think the party should lose an honest person like him,” Swamy said.
