In the wake of BJP elders demanding that responsibility be fixed for the Bihar poll reverses, Finance Minister Arun Jaitley on Thursday met senior party leader Murli Manohar Joshi, who was one of the four veterans criticising the leadership for the party’s poor showing in the elections.
This meeting came about as it appeared that Union Home Minister and former party president Rajnath Singh was against taking any action against those airing their views in public as suggested earlier by Union Minister and senior party leader Nitin Gadkari.
The meeting between Jaitley and Joshi is understood to be part of the process of reconciliation between the two camps with divergent views, sources said, adding the Finance Minister has been entrusted with the responsibility of pacifying the seniors.
In a strongly-worded joint statement on November 10, senior BJP leaders like lK Advani, Joshi, Shanta Kumar and Yashwant Sinha had dismissed the argument of “collective responsibility” for the poll defeat contending the party’s assertion saying that none was responsible for the defeat.
“To say that everyone is responsible for the defeat is to ensure no one is held responsible,” the statement said on Tuesday. The four leaders said the party failed to learn lessons from the fiasco in Delhi Assembly polls.
Further, the statement said the party has been “emasculated” in the last one year and was being “forced to kow-tow to a handful”.
The parliamentary board meeting of the BJP which met on Monday to analyse the reasons of Bihar election defeat maintained that the party failed to anticipate the smooth transferability of votes among the rival JDU-RJD-Congress alliance. Jaitley maintained that that though the difference of percentage of votes polled between the two alliances remained the same from 2014 lok Sabha poll (45.3-38.8) in Bihar to 2015 Bihar Assembly polls (41.9-34.1), the ‘Mahagathbandhan’ was successful in having their votes transferred easily to each other.
The BJP-led alliance was routed in the Bihar elections by ‘Mahagathbandhan’. The BJP managed to win only 53 seats.
Jaitley had refused to pinpoint the blame for loss on any one leader saying it was a ‘collective loss’ for the party.