State BJP gets discipline dose

Vijay Deo Jha Ranchi Monday, July 6, 2009

The Jharkhand BJP leaders sat like students in the class and tuned in to the stories that national organisational secretary Ramlal read out from the Hitopadesh to teach them the need for discipline and unity in the party.

These stories had an element of interest: scores of party leaders felt Ramlal had chided the party leaders through story telling without involving high ideological note. And after each story, Ramlal asked the party leaders to draw a moral lesson.

"What lesson you draw from the story of a king who announces capital punishment for those who brings the news of demise of the parrot he likes," Ramlal asked the party leaders. The leaders, insides, were quick to draw their conclusion. "I do not know the moral of the story.

I was just trying to correlate it with party affairs and in every story and character I was trying to find Raghuwar Das and Arjun Munda, the two bete noir," a young party MLA kidded. After the two-day meeting of the State BJP working committee concluded on Sunday both the warring groups, one led by State BJP president Raghuwar Das and the other by Arjun Munda, held their separate meetings to analyse the loss and benefit they derived out of this conclave, which was attended by national president of the party Rajnath Singh too.

Das appeared to be standing firm. He seemed to be relishing the sudden rise of his stature in front of Singh, and the other BJP brass stayed silent. Nevertheless, on the first day of the meeting, BJP MLA CP Singh directly hit at Das for running the party on the caste line.

But he largely failed to dim the aura that Das so carefully built around him after the party won eight out of 14 parliamentary seats in Jharkhand. When it came to deliver his presidential address, Singh talked tough about the party discipline and warned the leaders with stern actions for failure to follow the same.

While Das camp interpreted it as a clear indication of Singh's unquestioned believe in the leadership of Das, the Munda camp largely remained reticent. The future course of the State BJP in the view of the coming Assembly election largely remained opaque.

"The reason is that Singh put a blanket over the leadership issue in the State. He gave both the groups enough room to speculate about their fair chance to grab the leadership," a senior party leader said. If there was an immediate outcome of this session, it was a clear polarisation between Munda and Das. The division was not restricted among the top brasses; the rank and file too echoed similar view. Viewing a clear division in the party on this issue, the BJP bosses do not want to give unnecessary hype to the leadership issue.

"There is no crisis of the leadership in the party and will be decided by the parliamentary board of the BJP after the election," Singh told the mediapersons. So far, the BJP has a policy to opt tribal face for the post of Chief Minister and Singh kept everybody in confusion. Leaders have gone; workers are left to muse over the political meaning of the story.