RSS seeks revenge, wants to clip Advani’s wings
VETERAN BJP LEADER HAD FOILED PLAN TO GET GADKARI A SECOND TERM AS PARTY CHIEF
Aseething Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh ( RSS) is planning to cut veteran Bharatiya Janata Party ( BJP) leader Lal Krishna Advani down to size for defying its wishes. Rajnath Singh, who took over as BJP president last week, is believed to be under pressure to drop Advani and his close associates from the parliamentary board — the apex decisionmaking body of the party.
Singh is expected to reconstitute the 11- member parliamentary board and name his new set of office- bearers after his election is ratified by the party’s national council at its meeting, which is scheduled to be held in the Madhya Pradesh capital Bhopal next month.
Singh is slated to call on the RSS chief Mohan Bhagwat at its national headquarters in Nagpur to discuss various issues including naming the party’s prime ministerial candidate for the 2014 general elections.
If Bhagwat has his way, Advani will soon be pushed to take retirement from active politics as he may even be denied nomination from the Gandhinagar Lok Sabha constituency next year.
Advani, 85, and the RSS have never got along. He was forced by the RSS to resign as the BJP president in 2005 and step down as leader of the opposition in the Lok Sabha in 2009 on the premise of promoting second generation leadership.
Both the former prime minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee and Advani had problems with RSS since they worked in the group before being asked by the organisation to join the RSS- promoted political party Jan Sangh, which is now BJP. The duo were much senior to the present RSS and never obeyed them while they served as the country’s prime minister and deputy prime minister respectively.
It was Advani who put his foot down and forced RSS choice Nitin Gadkari to resign and opt out of the race to get a second term as BJP president last week, forcing RSS to settle for its second choice in Rajnath Singh. It now seems that an unforgiving RSS wants not only Advani to be dropped from the new parliamentary board but also remove all his close associates.
Gujarat chief minister Narendra Modi, who in the past did not get along with both RSS and Rajnath Singh, has made up with both. While Modi called on Bhagwat at Nagpur in the midst of Gujarat elections, he came down to New Delhi on Sunday and spent two hours with Singh in his bid to become the next prime ministerial candidate.