By IANS,
New Delhi/ Lucknow: Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) president Rajnath Singh Sunday said his party was analysing the poll debacle but asserted – without referring to senior leader Yashwant Sinha’s media criticism – that this did not mean it should be made public.
“It’s time to introspect what went wrong. We are analysing the factors behind the unsatisfactory performance of the party, but that does not mean we start making those factors public,” Singh told a party gathering in Lucknow.
In the national capital, party leaders were cagey about discussing Sinha’s latest salvo in an interview to the news channel NDTV where he said the leadership was not serious about analysing the poll debacle.
“I don’t want to react on this issue,” BJP vice-president Mukhtar Abbas Naqvi told IANS in reply to a question about Sinha’s remarks, which he made earlier last month too.
Disregarding BJP chief Rajnath Singh’s warning to members, at the party’s national executive last month, to refrain from making public statements about the party, Sinha said in the interview that the BJP’s defeat was explained within the party in a “casual, light hearted manner”.
Party sources said the leadership was not in favour of any strict action against Sinha nor is it making any effort to win him over considering that he, according to them, did not wield much clout in the party and in public.
Similarly, former fellow minister Arun Shourie has criticised the BJP in his series of media articles on the country’s political scenario.
“The party is just letting them be, for nothing could be done about them. At another level, Sinha does not have much influence within and outside. Shourie’s second term as Rajya Sabha member is concluding early next year and going by our norm he may not get a third renomination,” a BJP strategist told IANS, pleading anonymity, lest he kick off “an unnecessary controversy.”
Sinha went on in the TV interview: “I thought there would be a lot of activity and introspection… somebody would ask me why we lost, where we lost. I found that nothing of that kind happened and that kind of disappointed me.”
He added: “I waited until we were called to a meeting of the newly elected parliamentarians May 31, and that again was somewhat casual, in a light hearted manner and we tried to (explain) away our defeat… It was not serious.”
Sinha also differed with the explanation given by senior leaders L.K. Advani and Arun Jaitley that the election results indicated the “emergence of a bipolar polity in the country” where the Congress scored over the BJP but this should give hope to the latter.
Singh reiterated this in Lucknow: “If we consider the party’s election results on an all India basis, we find there is no need to get dejected. We have emerged as the (largest) opposition party and hence must utilise this opportunity in winning the faith of the masses.”
But Sinha said in his interview: “These are consolations we can give to ourselves.”
The former finance minister expressed regret that despite having presented five budgets in the past, his party did not ask him to discuss this year’s union budget.
“I expected the party to ask me to speak on the budget… I was informed that somebody else was going to speak on this… and that clearly disappointed me,” he said.