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Electoral defeats, internal strife trouble BJP
Successive electoral debacles including the second consecutive defeat in the Lok Sabha elections and confronted by serious internal squabbles, the BJP steps into 2010 with a new President who wants to take the party out of the deep morass.
Successive electoral debacles including the second consecutive defeat in the Lok Sabha elections and confronted by serious internal squabbles, the BJP steps into 2010 with a new President who wants to take the party out of the deep morass.
So bad was the situation after the string of electoral losses that the party has chosen to ally with Jharkhand Mukti Morcha (JMM), whose chief Shibu Soren was its target of attack for long, even at the cost of taking a dent in its image for forming a coalition government there as the year 2009 wound up.
The new party President, Nitin Gadkari, a virtual non-entity on the national scene has spoken of reviving the party by broadening its base by reaching out to the Dalits and minorities. Widely believed to be an RSS-backed candidate, he has the difficult job of balancing his new priorities with the basic party policy of Hindutva.
Though BJP had lost power in Rajasthan and got a drubbing in Delhi in December 2008, it dusted itself up for the big battle by projecting 82-year-old Lal Krishna Advani as its prime ministerial candidate and attempted to take on the Congress-led UPA on issues like good governance, development and security.
