No end to BJP woes

In other states as well,its performance was no better,with the party losing in the sole seat that saw a bypoll in Chhattisgarh,and splitting the two seats each in Rajasthan and Himachal Pradesh with the Congress.

Lucknow (West) was no ordinary loss. Having represented the seat six times,Lalji Tandon — a confidant of Vajpayee — had this time contested the Lok Sabha seat following the former prime minister’s retirement from active politics. With the Lucknow (West) seat now empty,Tandon had desperately lobbied for a ticket from here for his son Gopaljee.

With the BJP also coming under attack for promoting dynastic politics,the proposal to field Gopaljee led to heated discussions in the party’s Central Election Committee,which spent an unusual two hours to finalise the candidate for the seat. Eventually,Gopaljee was refused party nomination and the BJP instead fielded Amit Puri — who had once contested as a rebel candidate from the seat — to set an example. There were two distinct streams of thought on the issue among the BJP’s second-rung leaders.

On the ground,the campaign suffered. An angry Tandon,who fancies himself as the BJP’s regional chieftain in Lucknow,refused to work for Puri’s election campaign. After much persuasion,he accompanied Puri to file his nomination papers,but kept away from the campaign. While factors like Brahmin candidates voting for the Congress instead of Gopaljee no doubt contributed to Puri’s loss,the Lucknow (West) was lost largely due to the feud in the party.

Even the “Vajpayee kurtas” Puri got specially prepared for his campaign evidently didn’t help. He ended up with 29,916 votes,as against 32,086 votes for the Congress’s Shyam Kishore Shukla. BJP leaders admitted that “low morale of party workers” coupled with the divide in the local party unit contributed to the defeat.

In Varanasi’s Kolasala Assembly segment,the story was not any different. Ajai Rai,who won the bypolls,was an active BJP leader until the recent Lok Sabha election when the party chose to field Murli Manohar Joshi from the Varanasi parliamentary seat,where he had staked his claim from too.

It’s widely accepted that UP BJP president Ramapati Ram Tripathi’s three-year term has been a disaster. And with the situation little different at the centre,the fallout is now visible electorally.

While the BJP hopes to get a new president by the year-end or early next year,there’s nothing to suggest that the coming two months would see any improvement in the party’s health. In fact,the slugfest and slanging match between the warring camps would only aggravate — there would be exchanges between those welcoming a more interventionist RSS role in the BJP,and those who don’t.

At another level,there would be the usual spars between the dominant factions in the party. Manifestations of such multi-layered feuds have recently been seen in Rajasthan and Karnataka. Bihar BJP is waiting to explode for another round of bout,and problems are being reported from Punjab too.

Coming as they do now,the electoral reverses couldn’t have been timed worse.