BJP leaders seem not to have not learnt any lessons after the electoral drubbing their party received in Bihar.
BJP leaders seem not to have not learnt any lessons after the electoral drubbing their party received in Bihar.
BJP general secretary Kailash Vijayvargiya on Monday likened the party’s Patna Sahib MP, Mr Shatrughan Sinha, to a dog. His comments against his fellow party leader came after Mr Sinha visited the JD(U)’s Nitish Kumar and RJD supremo Lalu Prasad Yadav in Patna. Mr Sinha described Mr Nitish Kumar as “a mascot for good governance and the tallest political personality”. Mr Vijayvargiya’s controversial comments came days after he was forced to withdraw his controversial tweets targeting Bollywood superstar Shah Rukh Khan.
“When a car moves, a dog moves under it too, the dog believes that the car is moving because of me. This party is not dependable on one person, it’s a whole organisation and there’s a big hierarchy here. Those who are out of it were on a maun vrat (vow of silence) and now they are speaking,” Mr Vijayvargiya said.
The dog analogy was being used by a BJP leader for the second time in recent weeks after Union minister V.K. Singh did so after dalit children were burnt to death in Faridabad.
Mr Vijayvargiya said, “Shatrughan Sinha’s identity in politics is because of the BJP and BJP’s identity is not because of him. How much loyal he should be towards the party should be decided by him (sic). Causing loss to the party even when you’ve taken so much from the party, that is for him to decide. I disagree with his behaviour,” he said. Mr Vijayvargiya added that a person is assessed by how he or she behaves during victory and defeat.
“It’s the party’s honest workers who did their hard work. Winning and losing happens in a democracy, but a person is identified by their behaviour after winning or losing. Everbody’s character is coming to light, whether it is Shatrughan Sinha or anybody else,” he added.
Mr Sinha, who has been severely critical of the BJP leadership, particularly those in the Bihar unit, after he was left out of the campaign for the Assembly polls, said he was “deliberately sidelined”.
“I am not bragging, but I do feel that when the laadla (darling) of the Bihar people, the dhartiputra (son of the soil) and the original Bihari babu was deliberately sidelined, it definitely had an impact on my supporters and fans... I can’t say how much difference it could have been, but I can definitely say some difference would have been there. We could have definitely got more seats than what we got,” Mr Sinha said to a news channel. The NDA got just 58 seats in a House of 243. Mr Sinha also attacked the party leadership for bringing leaders from outside the state to micromanage the Bihar campaign. He said they were brought in from Punjab, Maharashtra and Delhi and “were completely out of touch with grassroots workers and ground reality, who did not understand the caste equations here.”
Mr Vijayvargiya had dubbed Shah Rukh an “anti-nationalist” for his “extreme intolerance” comment. “Shah Rukh lives in India, but his soul is in Pakistan. His films make crores here but he thinks India to be intolerant,” Mr Vijayvargiya had said in a series of tweets amid mounting concerns over the “climate of intolerance”.
“If this is not anti-nationalist, then what is it,” he said. The BJP leader later withdrew his tweets after drawing fire.
