TMC leader Yashwant Singh addresses a press conference during the ongoing West Bengal Assembly polls, at Trinamool Bhavan in Kolkata. West Bengal Women and Child Development Minist...
TMC leader Yashwant Sinha (L), party candidate from Chowringhee constituency Nayna Bandyopadhyay (C), West Bengal Minister for Panchayat and Rural Development and party candidate f...
Former BJP leader and former union minister Yashwant Sinha speaks to media after joining Trinamool Congress Party (TMC), ahead of West Bengal assembly polls, in Kolkata.
West Bengal Panchayat and Rural Development Minister Subrata Mukherjee (C) greets former BJP leader Yashwant Sinha (R) after he joined Trinamool Congress Party ahead of West Bengal...
Former union minister Yashwant Sinha with United Democratic Alliance (UDA) leaders shows a memorandum on the issue of flood in North Bihar, outside Raj Bhawan in Patna.
Former Union Minister Yashwant Sinha pays tribute to Lok Nayak Jai Prakash Narayan before starting his Jan Sanvad rally 'Badalo Bihar - Banao Behatar Bihar', ahead of the Bihar Ass...
Former union minister Yashwant Sinha addresses a press conference during ‘Is Bar Badlen Bihar’ campaign, in Patna.
Former union minister Yashwant Sinha along with his supporters stages a dharna at Rajghat over alleged mishandling of migrant workers' crisis by the government, in New Delhi.
Former Union finance minister Yashwant Sinha (C) flanked by Loktantrik Janata Dal (LJD) chief Sharad Yadav (L) on right former JDU leaders Pawan Verma and others as they pay tribut...
Former Union finance minister Yashwant Sinha addresses a press conference after concluding his Gandhi Shanti Yatra (Gandhi Peace March), which he started from Mumbai on Jan. 9. 202...
Former JDU leaders Pawan Verma addresses a press conference on the concluding day of Gandhi Shanti Yatra (Gandhi Peace March), which started from Mumbai on Jan. 9. 2020, to push fo...
(L-R) Samajwadi Party President Akhilesh Yadav former union minister Yashwant Sinha and Congress leader Shatrughan Sinha during a joint press conference, in Lucknow.
BJP leader and former Union minister Yashwant Sinha (C) with former Gujarat CM Suresh Mehta (L) and others leaders at a sit-in protest against the Citizenship Amendment Act and Nat...
Former union minister Yashwant Sinha, with NCP chief Sharad Pawar and former Maharashtra CM Prithviraj Chavan, speaks at the launch of 'Gandhi Shanti Yatra' from the Gateway of Ind...
Former Union minister Yashwant Sinha along with actor- politician Shatrughan Sinha and former Maharashtra CM Prithviraj Chavan at a press conference to announce the Gandhi Shanti Y...
Former union minister Yashwant Sinha and his wife Nilima Sinha show their inked fingers after casting their votes at a polling booth during the third phase of Jharkhand Assembly El...
A delegation of Indian Civil Society group led by former union finance minister Yashwant Sinha interact with the members of Kashmir Chamber of Commerce and Industries to assess the...
In this file photo, is seen former external affairs minister Sushma Swaraj with Yashwant Singh releasing a stamp at PIB, in New Delhi. The BJP leader passed away at the age of 67 o...
Former President Pranab Mukherjee along with author and former Union minister Arun Shourie (R) and Congress MP Shashi Tharoor (L) releases former Union minister Yashwant Sinha's au...
Former Union minister Yashwant Sinha with former minister Arun Shourie and actor-turned politician Shatrughan Sinha at the release of his autobiography Relentless, at a function in...
So what's going on in the BJP? Swapan Dasgupta in the Asian Age offers some theories:
Two games are being played simultaneously within the BJP. First, there appears to be a determined resistance by some BJP elders, particularly those in their mid-60s and above, to a generational change in the party... Alongside this battle against superannuation is the battle over ideas. A reason why the BJP has hitherto not permitted a structured post-mortem is rooted in the intellectual insecurities of a few leaders.But then he also offers us a touching insight into his belief-system:
...the post-defeat turbulence marks a quiet battle between those who want the BJP to be a wholesome and sober nationalist party, and those who have little inhibitions against making it a variant of the Samajwadi Party and Bahujan Samaj Party".
Some of the comments to my earlier blogs have detected an apparent contradiction between my dislike of hardline politics and my support for Modi. That is because I believe that Modi will soon come to be accepted as the most enlightened and modern BJP face.
Just look at the regressive types who were trying to create a riot in Surat and you will see what I mean.
It's still very much the open season as far as the BJP is concerned. Vir Sanghvi says the middleclass has grown up, the BJP has not. And as if to prove him right, after Arun Jaitley, Sudheendra Kulkarni, Brajesh Mishra, Anil Chawla and Jaswant Singh, it was now the turn of Mr Yashwant Sinha to go public with what he points out are the problems with the party. Mr Rajnath Singh's problems clearly are not over, despite the gag-order that seems to have been more than a bit belated.
Meanwhile, Swapan Dasgupta responds to Sudheendra Kulkarni's observations in Tehelka and says that while some of them are unexceptionable, the real problem with the BJP was that "Advani didn’t attend to the problems. Instead, he embarked on the suicidal course of trying to transform a parliamentary election into a presidential one.... Advani strategy lay in bypassing a problem-ridden party..." and, indeed, that "[t]here are many in the BJP who insist that the problem with Advani was Kulkarni".
Pratap Bhanu Mehta feels that this public spat is a good thing and what the BJP needs is not so much a chintan as much as a manthan, a churning, to root out the poison. His pithy prognosis: it is a party of little men:
It is a party that thrives on victimhood: whatever happens is always someone else's fault. No wonder "atma chintan" is looking a bit like an oxymoron. Other parties have abandoned nationalism for opportunism. BJP did something worse: it made nationalism opportunism. No wonder its leaders cannot face up to the fact that most of them have been playing a game of such petty interests.
And he raises the more fundamental question about the party's future: "Is there any leader amongst this lot who has the minimal credibility to take the party in any direction?" Only to conclude with what is clearly the crux of the matter: "More than the RSS, it is now clear that what made the party viable was Mr. Vajpayee".
