No action against Group of 4, indicate Venkaiah Naidu and Nitin Gadkari

However, the strain continued to simmer with Gadkari’s Cabinet colleague M Venkaiah Naidu suggesting that the veterans might have raised their considerations inside the party.

He said Mr. Advani and other senior leaders, who were signatories to the party’s statement issued over Bihar election results, should mend their ways in the interest of the party.

Advani, Joshi, Yashwant Sinha and Sahanta Kumar issued a joint statement demanding that responsibility should be fixed for the party’s dismal show in Bihar.

The first salvo came from BJP veterans sidelined by the new dispensation under party president Amit Shah and Prime Minister Narendra Modi.

It added that a review “must not be done by the very persons who have managed and who have been responsible for the campaign in Bihar”. Secondly, in Haryana and Maharashtra, the party could do without projecting a Chief Ministerial candidate as there was no credible alternative in the ruling dispensation unlike in Bihar.

Following that, Gadkari, Naidu and Home Minister Rajnath Singh had issued a press release, reminding the veterans that the party had exclusively adopted the precedent set by them.

“We thought we were a party with a difference”.

Many BJP leaders are up in arms against the strategies that led to the spectacular debacle: they are calling for an assessment of the mistakes made and seeking action against those who made those mistakes.

BJP veterans, who have raised a banner of revolt against the party leadership, today held deliberations among themselves, amidst rumblings in the party over the Bihar assembly poll debacle. But as incidents of extreme intolerance increased, culminating in the Dadri lynching before the Bihar polls, it was the Moody’s, which once endorsed Modi’s leadership for better economic growth in India, warned that development won’t be possible without tolerance and peace. Naidu said “winning and loosing happens, we never held any individual or for that matter group of individuals responsible for these defeats”. “We will take note of these concerns and discuss with all concerned people”.

“A section of leaders in the party is in support of these veterans”. Congress Vice President Rahul Gandhi had said after his party’s rout in last year’s general elections that Modi had got 31 percent votes, which meant that 69 percent votes were cast against him.

The BJP won only 53 seats in the state’s 243-seat legislature, down from 84 before the poll. The success of Mayawati’s BSP in recent Panchayaat polls in neighbouring Uttar Pradesh also portends a stiff challenge from the backward communities in the assembly polls of the state for the BJP in 2017.

The Diwali rockets have come flying, not from Pakistan, but from the old guard of the Bharatiya Janata Party, who have no doubt ruined whatever remained of party president Amit Shah’s Diwali. “That is very bad, very sad”, Singh told NDTV. When BJP was trying to improve its performance after 2009, Modi proved to be “the man for the occasion” for both the party and the nation, he said.

Unfortunately, BJP and Mr Modi deliberately gave Bihar elections a national context.