Infighting to hit Delhi BJP’s show in Assembly polls

‘BJP leaders are also unable to match the people-to-people contact of AAP’.

 

NEW DELHI :Plagued by a lack of coordination among its top leaders in Delhi and unable to match the people-to-people contact of the Aam Aadmi Party (AAP), the Bharatiya Janata Party in Delhi is again staring at a loss in the Delhi Assembly elections, the dates for which are likely to be announced soon.

Multiple state party leaders, owing allegiance to different leaders, told The Sunday Guardian that, as of now, the BJP is not in a position to defeat the AAP in the forthcoming elections.

All of them agreed that the BJP, despite being aware of it for a long time now, has been unable to tackle the challenge of infighting among top leaders and the lack of people-to-people contact, which they said, AAP has become a master in.

According to party leaders, BJP state party president and Lok Sabha MP Manoj Tiwari, appointed on the said post in November 2016, has neither been able to establish his total control over the organisation nor has he been able to isolate the other top leaders like Vijay Goel, Vijender Gupta and Parvesh Verma who consider themselves as the true inheritor of the Delhi BJP after Madan Lal Khurana and Saheb Singh Verma.

A party leader close to the Tiwari group said: “Tiwari, despite being the party president, was not given full freedom to do as he wanted. This did not give him the space to appoint his men. As a result, the chain of coordination that is needed to run the organisation smoothly was broken at many places, unlike in AAP, where even the smallest of directions of Kejriwal, is followed by every worker. The leaders close to Goel do not follow Tiwari’s orders as they believe that Tiwari is not the right man to lead the party and vice-versa.”

Tiwari’s inexperience in politics and his inability to connect with the workers, too, has damaged the party’s interests, a RSS functionary claimed. “He is a crowd puller, that involves using the stage and performing, but he is not adept in people-to-people management. He dislikes too much of mass-contact programmes, something which ideally should be the first nature of a politician,” he said.

According to another party leader, it was now too late to make any change at the top.

“The party leadership is hoping that the Purvanchali voters will vote for the BJP because of Tiwari, but then AAP has more effective Purvanchali representation on the ground and now even Congress has smartly roped in Kirti Azad as its Purvanchali face,” he said.

To illustrate the inefficiency of the Delhi BJP leaders, he gave an example of how a minor work like covering of a sewage line in his area was done by the AAP MLA.

“I am a party functionary and have direct access to all state leaders. I approached every state leader for this small ‘favour’. But nothing happened. Then I met the mayor and councilor who all are from my party, but no one was interested. Ultimately, I met the AAP MLA and the work was done. You tell me whom should I vote for in the coming elections? If this is how the party leaders handle the grievance of a party functionary, you can imagine how they are handling the problems of the common man,” he said.

The leaders said that the BJP was unable to take the benefit of having the largest number of councillors and having mayors in all the three municipal corporations.

A Delhi BJP functionary added: “If these corporators and mayors had worked diligently on the ground and made improvement in basic infrastructure, voters would have looked at us favorably, but that too has not happened. Why would the voters vote for us if despite winning all the seven MP seats and running the corporations, we have not been able to give them even basic things like clean roads and efficient garbage disposal?”