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Former Finance Minister and senior Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) leader Yashwant Sinha did a U-turn on Gujarat chief minister Narendra Modi, saying he would be the country's next Prime Minister.
To be precise, on June 8, Sinha said that he had chosen to stay away from the party’s national executive meeting in Goa not because of 'NaMonia', an oblique reference to aversion to the Gujarat CM. He said: "I don't have 'NaMonia'. I am in perfect health. But there could be other reasons for not going to Goa because of which I have not gone there.”
'NaMonia' emerged as a euphemism to refer to a group of BJP leaders, including LK Advani and Jaswant Singh, who reported sick and skipped the party's Goa national executive meeting. It has become fashionable in BJP circles to describe Narendra Modi as “NaMo”.
The much-trumpeted BJP’s prime ministerial candidate story has aroused enormous expectations. Time was when the former foreign minister had said senior party leaders Advani, Sushma Swaraj and Arun Jaitley were in the front line for the post. 'Did Prime Minister Manmohan Singh or the Congress declare who will be their prime ministerial candidate? Will it be from among Rahul Gandhi, A K Antony or Digvijay Singh or some other?' he once asked.
"If Advani ji is available to lead the party and the government, then that should be the end of all discussions," the former Union minister said in April 2013.
Only a few months back, Sinha had expressed his support for Modi's candidature. Sinha's comments found almost instant validation with even the Shiromani Akali Dal, which had been backing Modi, also expressing its support for Advani.
After Modi’s infamous “burqa of secularism’ comments, Sinha wrote in a newpaper article that the “more” Modi spoke, the more his baiters will create controversies and try and deflect people’s attention from the UPA’s “misgovernance and corruption”.
Why Modi now?
Political pundits are of the view that his calculations are premised on the belief that the momentum is in favour of Modi. Since 2009, the Hindutva poster boy has emerged as the favourite choice of BJP-inclined voters. An interesting facet of the game plan that is driving Sinha is the belief that by the time of the next general election, the RSS will manage to completely sideline Advani in the last round of growing power struggle. The RSS wanted Advani to call it a day five years ago when the BJP lost the Lok Sabha polls in 2009. Sinha displayed a streak of astuteness as he has already begun preparations for life with Modi inside the party.
Since the mood of the BJP cadre and the RSS are in no way in tune with Sinha’s approach, BJP watchers feel that the veteran leader wants to secure his place in a Modi-led dispensation.
In March, Sinha failed to secure a berth in party president Rajnath Singh’s core team. This could be because he was one of the first to demand the resignation of former president Nitin Gadkari. Modi's clout was already visible in the appointment of his confidant Amit Shah as one of the general secretaries.
In June 2009, in a five-page letter that was a veiled attack on Advani and his loyalists, Sinha had called for collective responsibility for the election debacle and offered to resign from all party posts. Then BJP boss Rajnath promptly accepted the resignations. Sinha who in June 2005 had first demanded Advani should quit as BJP chief for praising Mohammed Ali Jinnah. Advani finally had to step down under RSS pressure.
