NEW DELHI: Bharatiya Janata Janata Party (BJP) President Nitin Gadkari on Thursday said that Gujarat Chief Minister Narendra Modi is one of the party's prime ministerial candidate for the 2014 Lok Sabha elections. Gadkari's statement came a few hours after the Special Investigation Team (SIT) report on Gulbarg Society massacre during the 2002 Gujarat riots placed before a Ahmedabad court found no prosecutable evidence against Modi.
"Narendra Modi is very much one of our prime ministerial candidates for 2014. If Modi gets clean chit (in the Gujarat riots case) it will only confirm what we have been saying," Gadkari said.
However, Gadkari remained non-committal on why the Gujarat Chief Minister was not campaigning for the party in Uttar Pradesh elections. Gadkari said that Modi is the best person to answer why he had not joined the party's election campaign in Uttar Pradesh.
Modi is reportedly angry with the BJP leadership for making one of his rivals, Sanjay Joshi, as one of the election in-charges in Uttar Pradesh.