The Bharatiya Janata Party remained a house divided as the party went ahead and named Gujarat chief minister Narendra Modi as the NDA’s prime ministerial candidate for the 2014 general polls in the meeting of its parliamentary board on Friday evening.
If BJP patriarch L.K. Advani expressed his “dissent” and skipped the meet, his protégé and Leader of the Opposition in the Lok Sabha Sushma Swaraj’s grim face at Mr Modi’s reception in the BJP headquarters exposed the simmering dissent. Mr Advani’s opposition fell by the wayside as the RSS had moved in and backed Mr Modi to the hilt. It was the RSS which had made it clear to BJP chief Rajnath Singh that Mr Modi be anointed at the earliest.
Despite hectic parleys, cajoling, persuasion by top leaders for the last few days, Mr Advani refused to relent. In his letter to the BJP chief, Mr Advani made it categorically clear that he was “unhappy” with the decision. “This afternoon, when you had come to my residence to inform me about the parliamentary board meeting, I had said something about my anguish as also my disappointment over your style of functioning,” Mr Advani did not even spare the BJP chief.