Much like the Bharatiya Janata Party’s (BJP) margadarshak mandal, which hasn’t had a single meeting till date, the party’s disciplinary action committee appears to have become another vestigial organ of the BJP.

Its members, BJP veterans L K Advani and Murli Manohar Joshi, are often seen “guiding” the party from other platforms. Joshi recently advised the party publicly that Vice Chancellor of Jawaharlal Nehru University Jagadesh Kumar be sacked for being inefficient. The BJP-led central government, however, chose to ignore Joshi’s counsel.

The fate of the disciplinary action committee, comprising Balrampur MP Satya Deo Singh and Guwahati MP Bijoya Chakravarty, is same. Recently, BJP MP from Karnataka, Ananth Hegde, targeted Mahatma Gandhi who is invoked repeatedly by the BJP as one of the party’s guiding lights. But, no complaint has been forwarded to the committee, Singh told weekly Sunday Guardian. “The process, in any matter related to the party discipline, is that the state or national president refers complaints to the committee, after which we start looking into it. As of today, we have received no intimation to look into Hegde’s matter,” he said. Not just Hegde, Pragya Singh Thakur, Nalin Kumar Kateel, Giriraj Singh, Sakshi Maharaj and Akash Vijayvargiya to name a few have made several controversial statements, eliciting opposition in the party.