Admitting that he had come to the “painful realisation” that he could no longer “meaningfully” contribute to the BJP, Sudheendra Kulkarni announced today that after 13 years as a full-time party activist — during which he worked as a close aide of Prime Minister A B Vajpayee and then led L K Advani’s 2009 campiagn — he had decided to “end my active association with the party”.

Citing “ideological differences with the BJP as it stands today,” Kulkarni said in a signed statement: “I shall, however, continue to be its well-wisher.”

Kulkarni, incidentally, had stepped down as an office-bearer in 2005 — in the wake of Advani’s Jinnah controversy — and then sent a letter to Advani calling for “recasting” the RSS-BJP relationship, distancing the party from extremist elements and solving the “organisational disarray.” These issues have come back to haunt the party after the expulsion of Jaswant Singh in Shimla.

After the election defeat in 2009, Kulkarni had written that the “BJP and Sangh Parivar made a strong leader like Advani... look weak, helpless and not fully in command,” criticised Varun Gandhi’s speech and underlined how allies had drifted away after the Gujarat riots.

In his statement today, Kulkarni said: “I was attracted to the BJP because of twin factors. First was my disillusionment with the Indian communist movement, where I first cut my teeth as a political activist. I found answers to many of my questions in ‘Integral Humanism’, the philosophical treatise authored by Pandit Deendayal Upadhyaya, the ideological guru of the BJP and one of the greatest political thinkers of modern India. The second factor was the inspiring personalities of Shri Advani and Shri Vajpayee, who embodied high ideals.”

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