BJP discusses Ahluwalia’s RS poll defeat

Senior BJP leaders met in Parliament on Friday morning and discussed the defeat of party candidate SS Ahluwalia in the Jharkhand Rajya Sabha polls.

Senior BJP leaders met in Parliament on Friday morning and discussed the defeat of party candidate SS Ahluwalia in the Jharkhand Rajya Sabha polls.

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Party patriarch LK Advani, Sushma Swaraj, Yashwant Sinha, Jaswant Singh and Ananth Kumar were present at the meeting, which a party leader described as a routine affair where the Ahluwalia issue cropped up.

Sinha said in no uncertain terms that the party should have put in more effort to ensure his victory and that requisite effort was not put to win the tough poll.

The issue gains importance in the wake of a widespread perception that Ahluwalia — the party’s outgoing deputy leader in the Rajya Sabha who was seen as adept at his work — initially did not find favour with party president Nitin Gadkari and was accommodated right in the end.

Jharkhand CM Arjun Munda is also alleged to have not put his weight behind Ahluwalia to see him through. HTC