Nitin Gadkari denies attacking BJP veterans

His remark that defeat of BJP in Bihar will be celebrated in Pakistan with firecrackers sealed the BJP’s fate.

Gadkari, along with two former presidents, Rajnath Singh and M Venkaiah Naidu, had issued a statement on the party’s behalf soon after the veterans launched their attack and demanded that responsibility be fixed for the Bihar loss, alleging that BJP had been “emasculated” in one year. “A party is responsible for underperformance”. For the JD(U), which contested alone in 2014, its CVS was merely 16.2 per cent, but this jumped to 40.12 per cent in 2015. The Grand Alliance of Chief Minister Nitish Kumar, Lalu Yadav and the Congress won 178 seats. As Arun Shourie, who has turned from a vocal supporter to a devastating critic said, the Prime Minister seems to have lost the plot and has gone back on all that he had promised to do. The head of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), the BJP’s ideological guiding force, mused that it might be time to review India’s program of caste-based affirmative action, a red flag in the Hindi heartland. In September, a Muslim man who was alleged to have slaughtered a cow was lynched.

The remarks were roundly criticized in public by actors, writers and scientists. This has been brought out openly by actor Shatrughan Sinha and quietly by leaders like Yashwant Sinha who had been warning of defeat for a while now.

State elections decide who controls the upper house of India’s Parliament.

As a result, a few important bills, including one to introduce a goods and services tax to unify the gamut of indirect taxes imposed by states, were left on the shelf during the parliamentary session in July and August. But the political dynamics of Gujarat do not translate well in all other states any more than Modi can govern India like a state.

The BJP-led alliance was routed in the Bihar elections by “Mahagathbandhan”. The BJP entered the five-week-long state election campaign in an upbeat mood, confident of repeating a landslide victory to take the reins of government. When BJP had won Bihar in 2005 and 2010, did that have an impact on Bengal? Modi far surpassed that mark. He also needs to fix his campaign managers who allowed him to deviate from development to “beef” and other topics which derailed his election campaign. Home Minister Rajnath Singh suggested that the views of the Party elders be heard and no action are taken against them. It was the biggest political setback for Mr Modi since he was swept to power in a general election in May past year. “I am satisfied”, Kumar told PTI.

Union Minister Nitin Gadkari denied that he had asked BJP president Amit Shah to take disciplinary action against the seniors. The saffron coalition banked on PM Modi’s personal popularity and didn’t project a chief ministerial candidate but the strategy appeared to have backfired with the BJP doing poorly even in its former strongholds. Indeed, India’s economy, in terms of number of people living below the poverty line, is roughly where China’s was when it embarked in 1991 on the growth drive that has today made it the world’s second-largest economy.