By TCN News
Delhi: BJP veterans Lal Krishna Advani, Yashwant Sinha, Murli Manohar Joshi and Shanta Kumar believe that the party learnt no lessons from the Delhi elections fiasco, and the principal reason for its Bihar debacle lies in “the way the Party has been emasculated in the last year”, a joint statement issued by them said.
“The results of the Bihar elections show that no lesson has been learnt from the fiasco in Delhi. To say that everyone is responsible for the defeat in Bihar is to ensure that no one is held responsible. It shows that those who would have appropriated credit if the Party had won are bent on shrugging off responsibility for the disastrous showing in Bihar,” the statement said.
The BJP started the year with the disastrous Delhi elections, where they won just three of the 70 seats. Many believed that side-lining local leaders, along with the curious choice of nominating Kiran Bedi for the post of potential Chief Minister if they came to power, to be major mistakes. In Bihar however, the central command went against BJP tradition and never gave a firm backing to any of the potential CM candidates, ensuring that the campaign was run almost exclusively by party president Amit Shah and PM Narendra Modi. The party veterans hardly, if at all, featured in Bihar election campaigns, with even current leaders like Shatrughan Sinha, a Member of Parliament, giving the campaign a miss.
“A thorough review must be done of the reasons for the defeat as well as the way the Party is being forced to kow-tow to a handful, and how its consensual character has been destroyed. This review must not be done by the very persons who have managed and who have been responsible for the campaign in Bihar,” the statement added.