It was Rajasthan Chief Minister Vasundhara Raje’s idea but the state BJP now wants to forget all about it.

Vasundhara Raje recently dispatched a senior minister and some of her loyalists to West Bengal to study how the Left parties retain their hold at the grassroots and win successive elections.

Hardliners in the party are upset at this dalliance with “the enemy”, saying it’s an “ideological compromise.”

The team, led by Rajasthan Public Works Minister Rajendra Singh Rathore, spent four days in Kolkata and visited villages to learn what election tactics the Marxists adopt. It spent a night in one village for a first-hand experience of political management and interviewed West Bengal ministers and Marxist leaders.

It’s learnt that the team even wrote a detailed report for the Chief Minister, suggesting some of the strategies the BJP could adopt in Rajasthan.

But hardliners in the party are annoyed. “How can we hold up the Marxists as idols? The BJP and Communists are at opposite ends of the ideological divide,” said a former state BJP unit chief.

They have even written to BJP president Rajnath Singh that “such a public display of affection for Enemy No. 1” would send out wrong signals.

Meanwhile, the Vasundhara Raje camp has its own explanation. Team leader Rathore told The Indian Express: “We had gone there to invite non-resident Rajasthanis to invest in the state. Since we had some time, we also met people in the government there. Is that a crime?”

The CM’s loyalists have also dug up an old speech by RSS chief K S Sudarshan to justify the exercise. “A few weeks after the BJP government was sworn in, there was a camp in Kota where Sudarshan advised us to adopt the West Bengal pattern. Our CM was only following his suggestion,” said a BJP leader.