Quiet coup

Experienced and responsible members of the BJP national executive like Shanta Kumar, T N Chaturvedi and Sahib Singh Verma, who were opposed to Narendra Modi continuing as chief minister, were taken aback by the coup engineered by the younger members of the party such as Arun Jaitley, Venkaiah Naidu and Ananth Kumar in Goa. The Gujarat issue was listed on the agenda for April 13, but a day earlier Modi announced his resignation. The national executive was hustled into taking a decision on the resignation in a hurry, on the plea that the news had already leaked to the media.

Prime Minister Vajpayee’s suggestion that the only response to the call for Modi’s resignation was to go back to the electorate for a fresh mandate under Modi’s leadership was a virtual fait accompli and set the tone for the discussion.

The RSS leadership has made Modi remaining CM a prestige issue and the PM seems to have been brought around by L K Advani and his speech writer Sudheendra Kulkarni.

Many in the party were buoyed by a professional poll survey commissioned by the BJP, which indicated that the party would get a two thirds majority should Gujarat assembly polls be held soon.

While the articulate, better educated and supposedly modern youth leaders — who have come up without facing elections at the grassroots — plumped for short-term advantage, it was a section of the party’s old guard which realised that by insisting on retaining Modi, the stigma of untouchability will once again haunt the BJP for a long time to come.

Hosts roasted

Central ministers Yashwant Sinha and Digvijay Singh, co-hosts of Chandra Shekhar’s 75th birthday bash, were put in an awkward position after the birthday boy attacked the prime minister, who was the chief guest.

After the felicitations, most of the guests — who included leading politicians, industrialists and journalists — were served a buffet dinner. But a room with six tables was reserved for a sitdown supper for Chandra Shekhar, the PM and a few VVIPs.

Unfortunately half the tables were empty in the special enclosure, since most of the Union ministers, including Home Minister Advani, who had heard the speeches, were in no mood to stay on and break bread with Shekhar. Vajpayee sat through dinner with a grim expression.

Advani had particular reason to feel slighted. When Chandra Shekhar remarked that the reason he didn’t want Vajpayee to resign was because people worse than him would take over, there were claps from some members of the audience.

Advani curiously was seated in the hall, while the prime minister’s speech writer, Sudheendra Kulkarni, found a chair for himself on the dais, along with Chandra Shekhar and the prime minister.

Gandhi phobia

The recent visit to Gujarat of a team from the Editor’s Guild was an eye-opener. At the Ahmedabad Circuit House, a group of young men with saffron scarves burst into the room and demanded to know the purpose of the visit.

The first belligerent question was, ‘Are you a Hindu or a Muslim?’, followed by a query as to why one member of the delegation was wearing khadi.

In the present dispensation in Gujarat ‘khadiwallah’ has become a derogatory term and so has ‘Gandhism’. The youth delegation made it clear that Gandhi was no longer the state’s hero. Gujarat’s real hero was Sardar Patel.

Recently, when a film on Ambedkar was screened in Ahmedabad, a section of the audience clapped every time Gandhi suffered a setback on screen.

Nominal chief

Home Minister L K Advani announced during the BJP meet in Goa that there would be major changes in the party by May. Advani wants to hand over the reins of leadership in the organisation to the younger generation such as Pramod Mahajan, Venkaiah Naidu and Arun Jaitley.

BJP chief Jana Krishnamurthy was taken aback by Advani’s unilateral announcement. He had not been consulted and there is still a year left of his presidential term!

Shared grievance

The emergency NDA meet last Sunday was convened to discuss Chandrababu Naidu’s threat to pull out from the alliance, but the focus was mainly on the media, not Naidu.

L K Advani complained that a section of the media could not digest the fact that the government had survived for so long and was determined to present it in a distorted light.

George Fernandes, still recovering from the Tehelka scandal, was equally bitter. So was Vajpayee who felt his speech in Goa about fundamentalist Islam had been distorted.

It was left to the MDMK’s Vaiko and the Lok Tantric Congress’s Rajeev Shukla to remind the BJP leaders that the meeting had been called to discuss the options in case Naidu pulled out.

Language lesson

Sonia Gandhi could not understand what the fuss was all about when she suggested at her press conference that the PM had lost his mental balance (manasik santulan bigad gaya hai). A fortnight earlier, her speech writer had incorporated this rather sanskritised Hindi statement into a speech Sonia delivered to the Congress Sewa Dal and nobody had complained or even noticed it.

Perhaps because the statement was used in a general context about those in power and had not targeted Vajpayee so directly.

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