Several Bharatiya Janata Party leaders are unhappy over the delay in forming the coordination panel that is supposed to act as a bridge between the party and the Atal Bihari Vajpayee government.
Some of them even feel that the delay is due to the party leadership's late realisation that such a panel would create problems for the government.
The party had decided to form the panel at its national executive in Gandhinagar this April after most executive committee members demanded that the BJP should evolve a mechanism to make ministers available to party workers and to make them more accountable to the party organisation.
Subsequently a committee was set up to look into the issue and suggest the mechanism for institutionalising the panel.
The committee has had three meetings since but is yet to reach a consensus or submit its report.
The four members of the committee are Union parliamentary affairs minister Madan Lal Khurana, former political advisor to the Prime Minister, Pramod Mahajan, party general secretary M Venkaiah Naidu and vice-president Jana Krishnamurthy.
The report should be ready by the first week of July, Krishnamurthy said. The members have had preliminary exchanges and one more meeting would be necessary to finalise the report, he added. He said the finalising of the report got delayed due to the preoccupation of the committee members, particularly Khurana and Mahajan, with the budget session of Parliament. Krishnamurthy and Naidu had also to leave Delhi frequently.
The committee members reportedly developed cold feet over the panel after initial enthusiasm when they realised that the task of setting up such a panel at the formal level was extremely difficult.
Khurana had announced at Gandhinagar that BJP ministers would sit at the party's Ahoka Road headquarters in order to interact with the party's rank and file. The committee members later realised that such a practice could shift the responsibilities of MPs towards their respective constituencies to the ministers, a BJP member said.
They also realised that to ask the ministers to sit at the party office could expose them to criticisms from other parties, a senior BJP leader said adding that ministers cannot be partisan and must be equally accessible to all.
These leaders now hold that the best way to resolve the problem would be to depute political persons in the ministerial staff. Party workers are more interested in getting their work done than to personally meet the ministers, one of them held.
As if to complement the committee's efforts, the party leadership is looking into the proposal to create a cell under one of the party office-bearers in order to get the cadres' work done at the earliest. The proposal to create such a cell has reportedly come from the newly appointed vice-president, Mridulla Sinha. Some party office-bearers could be asked to supervise this cell which could utilise the service of retired IAS officers , one leader said.
The main problem facing most leaders, particularly the new ones, is their ignorance about how to get things done from the government, he said. The cell comprising experts could help ease the problem, he added.
