Emboldened by an internal survey that reveals that Mr Narendra Modi is way ahead of Mr Nitish Kumar as far as Bihar voter preference is concerned regarding who should be the NDA’s prime ministerial candidate, the BJP has assigned senior party leader Arun Jaitley to ensure that Mr Kumar’s JD(U) stays in the NDA fold even if a decision is taken to field the Gujarat chief minister as the NDA candidate.
Sources in the Bihar unit of the BJP revealed that a survey was conducted of a substantially large sample to gauge the mood of people in Bihar. “In the survey a question was put to the voters: ‘Whom would you prefer as Prime Minister — Nitish Kumar or Narendra Modi?’ The results of the survey have shown a whopping 75 per cent of them expressing their preference for Mr Modi,” they said.
It is also learnt from sources close to the central leadership of the BJP that senior leader Arun Jaitley is being entrusted with the task of engaging the Bihar chief minister in a talk over the issue of the NDA’s prime ministerial candidate for the 2014 general election. “From among the top BJP leaders Mr Kumar is considered very close to Mr Jaitley and so he has been entrusted with the task of ensuring that the JD(U) does not leave the NDA alliance in case the party decides to fight the next general election under the leadership of Mr Modi,” they said.
The calculation in the BJP, however, is that if Mr Kumar and his party continue with their reservations about Mr Modi’s name, it would not be that disastrous in Bihar as is being projected in a section of media. “We will then be contesting all the 40 parliamentary constituencies. In alliance we get only 15 seats to contest and may manage to win 11-12 seats in a best-case scenario. But if we contest all the seats, there is always a possibility of improving on the best-case scenario in the alliance and, thus, we would be able to add more seats to our party’s kitty,” an MLA from Bihar said.