BJP’s ‘neglected’ three

Overlooked by the leadership, party units in Andhra, Tamil Nadu and Delhi directionless ahead of 2019

At a time when the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) is focusing excessively on the Northeast, its units in Andhra Pradesh, Tamil Nadu and Delhi are facing the “high command’s continued neglect”.

While Andhra Pradesh and Tamil Nadu together send 64 members to the Lok Sabha, Delhi has seven parliamentary seats, all won by the BJP in 2014. The party, however, appears in no hurry to address its worries in these states before the 2019 Lok Sabha elections.

“Andhra Pradesh is the Centre’s stepchild,” rued a state office-bearer.

Pon Radhakrishnan, the Kanyakumari MP and junior minister in the present National Democratic Alliance government, took a kinder view of the alleged neglect of the party’s Tamil Nadu unit, saying the leadership “needs to concentrate on Kerala, where our workers are killed”. In Delhi, local leaders feel the Centre’s “failure” to pass a law to protect traders after the recent sealing drive has imperilled the business community’s steadfast support to the BJP.

“The BJP has been relegated to the background on sealing because the Urban affairs minister (Hardeep Singh Puri) and the Lt Governor (Anil Baijal) have refused to arbitrate,” a local leader complained.

Vijender Gupta, a Delhi legislator, stressed the national capital was not a pushover for the BJP. “We have seven MPs and control all the three municipalities and the Delhi Cantonment,” argued Gupta.

His peers and juniors chafed at the fact that the BJP was out of power in the Assembly for 18 years and blamed its success in the local body elections for 17 uninterrupted years as a “major reason”.

A former BJP legislator explained: “Popular expectations are huge and the resources are limited. Take sanitation. The municipalities lack carts and tricycles to transport the waste. There is no dumping ground after the Delhi High Court ordered the Okhla landfill to be shut. People’s anger at sanitation mismanagement spills over against us in the Assembly elections.”

The Delhi BJP has been rife with other issues, some of which pitted the state unit against the central leadership and the situation might have turned nasty had the local organisation not relented.

Among the issues was lack of coordination between the state president and North East Delhi MP, Manoj Tiwari, and the central minder, national vice-president of the party, Shyam Jaju.

While Tiwari, a former Bhojpuri singer and actor, has garnered support from the proliferating community of migrants from Uttar Pradesh and Bihar, he is shackled by lack of organisational help. “He does not get the official line on the day’s issues and struggles to put in place even a press release,” a source said.

So far, the BJP has no revival strategy for Delhi, save for harbouring a fond hope to see the Congress bounce back and confront the ruling Aam Aadmi Party (AAP). “The Congress and the AAP share the same vote bank. If the Congress is rejuvenated, the votes will split and that helps us,” an office-bearer said.

In Andhra Pradesh, the BJP functions under an “ad hoc” president, Kambhapati Hari Babu, a parliamentarian. The state unit does not have a central minder and no

working committee because Hari Babu is not empowered to constitute one.

A state leader said his party was “caught” in the competitive politics being staged between the Telugu Desam Party (TDP), which recently pulled out from the central government as well as the BJP-led NDA, and the YSR Congress for a special status to Andhra Pradesh that the Centre summarily rejected.

“Before Modi became the prime minister, he had promised special status to our state in Tirupati. We are silent spectators in the TDP-YSR Congress battle. We have been edged out,” the leader said.

From his standpoint, the situation has turned worse because the otherwise peregrinating BJP President Amit Shah did not visit Andhra Pradesh of late and called on neighbour Telangana only once in 2016. State leaders like former Congress minister D Purandeswari are “lying idle”,

while BJP legislature party leader, Krishna Kumar Raju, a businessman, is said to have “no idea of what to say or do” in the Assembly.

Tamil Nadu is lucky — it has a full-fledged president, Tamilisai Soundarrajan, an executive committee, and a central minder, P Muralidhar Rao. That’s it.

The BJP has lost all its allies, which were floating in the alphabet soup of small but substantial Dravidian parties it had cooked up before the 2014 general elections. Two seats, one each for the BJP and the Pattali Makkal Katchi, were ladled out from this soup but the cauldron has gone empty.

A state general secretary said the hunt for allies in would start fresh, closer to the 2019 Lok Sabha polls, when regional parties could assess which national party was more attractive to pull them in — the BJP or the Congress.