Jolted out of the Goa conclave euphoria with a shocker of resignation letter from BJP leader L K Advani, the party’s parliamentary board got together on Monday evening to unanimously reject his decision of calling quits from the party posts he holds. But that was all, no allowances were made.
In a show of unity, senior leaders of the BJP Rajnath Singh, Arun Jaitley, Sushma Swaraj, Venkaiah Naidu and others came out before media to announce that Advani’s “resignation will be not accepted in any form”.
BJP chief Rajnath Singh added: “The party needs him and his guidance more today than ever before.”
Sources say, despite Advani telling whosoever met him earlier in the day that he was upset, the BJP’s current leadership refused to reconsider Narendra Modi’s elevation as the party’s election campaign committee chief, a move said to been pushed through by the party’s mentoring body -- the RSS.
Though Modi himself did not fly down to Delhi to attend the party’s parliamentary board meeting, sources said that Rajnath spoke to him and other senior leaders, like Murli Manohar Joshi and “everyone agreed that Advaniji’s resignation cannot be accepted.”
So the party leaders appeared together to plead with Advani to withdraw his resignation.
But sources said, they are not really accepting the conditions Advani has put before them to make that possible.
If in the coming days, the BJP patriarch does bow down to pressure and take back his resignation, it would “not be on his terms”, but on the terms laid down at the Goa conclave.
Much as the party is embarrassed over the open divide between Advani and Modi, there’s no way that the younger leader would be asked to step back in deference to the view of the party veteran.
“Modi has been accepted as the most popular leader. The decision has been taken,’’ a senior leader of the party said.
In other words, despite Advani’s criticism that the cult of individualism and “personal agenda” of leaders have overshadowed the party “ideology”, the BJP parliamentary board members and the wider Sangh Parivar will stick to their stand that the BJP needs a new face, a rallying point to go the next elections -- which means no going back on Modi.
The former poster-boy of Hindutva, it appeared, has become an old man whose his hardliner image is too diluted to his detriment.
So his categorical demand to the battery of BJP leaders who visited him that the decision on Narendra Modi be reversed, has not been reconsidered.
It seems, both the RSS and the BJP leadership have also taken a dim view of the fact that the confidentiality of the letter Advani wrote to Rajnath was not maintained, by divulging it to the media.