With BJP president Rajnath Singh deciding to put the entire rank and file of the party under Gujarat chief minister Narendra Modi while deftly elevating himself to the league of stalwarts Atal Behari Vajpayee and L.K. Advani, the wily saffron leader has proved right those who say he is a “fox”.
Recently, an elaborate party architecture for the 2014 general election was announced according to which all senior and junior leaders, excluding Mr Vajpayee, Mr Advani and the party president, have been assigned jobs and made accountable to Mr Modi, the chief election campaigner. In one stroke, Mr Singh has made a huge jump in the party hierarchy, leaving all his contemporaries, like Ms Sushma Swaraj, Mr Arun Jaitley, Mr Venkaiah Naidu, and even stalwart M.M. Joshi, lower on the ladder.
The buzz in political circles is that Mr Singh’s all-out praise of Mr Modi, such as calling him the “most popular leader in the country”, is not without design. “Mr Singh, by eulogising Mr Modi, is creating a firewall around himself so that contemporary leaders cannot counter him and thus, at an opportune time, his claim for a certain post looks natural,” said a senior BJP functionary who has keenly watched the BJP president’s rising trajectory.
Close Advani aide Sudheendra Kulkarni, in a recent article published in a newspaper, claimed Mr Singh was a “fox” and Mr Modi “autocratic”.
Apart from the Modi-led central election campaign committee, there would be 20 sub-committees. “All sub-committees will be steered under the leadership of Narendra Modi...,” BJP general secretary Ananth Kumar had said.