In a veiled warning to his party, Prime Minister Narendra Modi on Saturday said the BJP is speaking in “different voices”.
Mr Modi was speaking at Diwali-Milan function organised at the party headquarters in the national capital. Recalling the Jan Sangh era, long before he joined active politics, Mr Modi said, “The words may differ, but the view of central leadership and junior most worker used to be same.”
This “ideological unanimity” he said, seems to have lost with the expansion of the party. He conceded that it is no longer possible to have “intense training sessions” and regular “communication” to achieve such coherence.
The Prime Minister’s comments come at a time when U.P. legislator Sangeet Som called Taj Mahal a blot on Indian history forcing Uttar Pradesh Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath tp pay a hurried visit to the monument soon after. The Rajasthan Chief Minister Vasundhara Raje’s Criminal Laws (Rajasthan Amendment) Ordinance 2017 is also at variance with BJP’s rhetoric against corruption. While the ordinance has been put on the back-burner for now, senior BJP functionaries indicated that had Rajasthan Chief Minister decided to carry on with the legislation, the central leadership would have intervened.
Mr Modi stressed that there was need to create more awareness about the internal working of a political party.
“It is true that the funding of political parties is a point of media discussion and many things come out in open. But overall, how they are formed, how they function, how they recruit, their values, their ideologies and their weaknesses, what is the reason behind such weaknesses, all this should be debated,” he said
It is essential, Mr Modi said, that political parties evolve with a true “democratic spirit”.
In an interaction with journalists after his speech, Mr. Modi replying to a question on the Gujarat elections, merely said, “Param-sukh”. Senior functionaries explained his comment to mean that the party will easily win 150 plus seats in the 182 member Gujarat Assembly.
They also sought to play down Congress recent overtures to Patidar leader Hardik Patel. “Let him join Congress, we have nothing to worry. In fact, it will only increase our tally,” a senior leader said.