By IANS
Lucknow : Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) leader L.K. Advani Sunday blamed continued infighting among the party’s rank and file for its plummeting political fortunes in Uttar Pradesh.
Addressing the party’s state executive here Sunday, Advani predicted the next Lok Sabha election would be held in the “first half of 2008”.
What provoked him to focus on infighting was apparently the absence at the meet of party vice-president and former chief minister Kalyan Singh, who now appears to have been nearly written off by the party leadership.
“What need to be seriously looked into are the reasons for the party’s steadily falling graph in Uttar Pradesh, particularly since 1998,” Advani told the crowded gathering that included the party’s state functionaries as well as its 51 MLAs.
“You need to actually go deep into the reasons for the party’s plummeting fortunes and find out what happened to us that we could not stage a comeback in Uttar Pradesh,” he said.
Flaying the growing nepotism within the party, Advani said, “I feel that personal considerations have taken precedence over merit in determining who is deserving and who is undeserving, so much so that party tickets were also being recommended on such considerations rather than on merits.
“Unfortunately, such tendencies seem to be catching on in Delhi too.”
He said, “We must live up to our reputation of being a party with a difference, and unless we can sink internal differences and rise above infighting, we would simply end up as any other political party.”
Blaming none other than the BJP cadres for the party’s debacle in the Uttar Pradesh assembly elections in May, Advani pointed out: “That was the time when people of the state were looking for a suitable alternative for the Samajwadi Party under whose rule people were really oppressed.
“The BSP (Bahujan Samaj Party) emerged as that alternative simply because it managed to impress upon the people of the state that it could not only provide a stable government but also an alternative to the Mulayam Singh Yadav government.”
Predicting the next parliamentary election would be held in the “first half of 2008”, the leader of opposition in the Lok Sabha felt that the current rift between the Left parties and the Congress over the India-US nuclear deal would lead to the downfall of the United Progressive Alliance (UPA) government at the centre.
He listed “terrorism, farmers’ suicides and the UPA affidavit on the Ram Sethu issue” as the party’s main issues for the next election.