The Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) State leadership will meet on Monday for a stock-taking session amidst raging controversies over the medical college bribery scam and its failure in launching a major campaign ahead of president Amit Shah’s visit in September.
Party sources told The Hindu that a series of programmes planned ahead of Mr. Shah’s visit, mainly the `Karya Vistar Yojana’ for reviving the organisational machinery, have all gone awry. In addition to that is the damaged incurred by the scam.
As per the yojana planned from July 28 to August 31, one party worker was expected to visit three booths, form committees and start working in the right earnest. It was decided to engage about 8,000 workers to revive the organisational machinery at the grassroot-level.
The programme has been deferred indefinitely in the wake of the scam and the controversies that battered the party of late. Now the national leadership is looking in askance at the State unit and refuses to accept its arguments to justify its lapses, sources said.
Mr. Shah is expected to tour the State in September and conduct roadshows well ahead of the Lok Sabha elections. Preparations in this score have also been put off and the national leadership would either have to make alternate arrangements on its own for Mr. Shah’s visit that was considered as the launch of the Lok Sabha election campaign.
The leadership would have to strain its nerves to offer a convincing reply to its State and district leaders who attend the meeting about the hawala transactions mentioned in the inquiry report, its leak, and disciplinary action initiated against secretary V.V. Rajesh and Bharatiya Janata Yuva Morcha general secretary Praful Krishna without seeking their version.
Meanwhile, the controversy took a new turn with one of the two organising secretaries revealing that the copy of the report forwarded to him was missing. The panel comprising K.P. Sreesan and K.K. Nazeer are understood to have forwarded copies of the report to Mr. Rajasekharan as well as the two organising secretaries.
The latest revelation has again put the leadership in a quandary. The alleged bid to doctor the report and dilute the observations against a general secretary too would come up for discussions at the leadership meeting, sources said.