Lalkrishna Advani

Advani takes Gadkari from ivory tower to tent

Prashun Bhaumik |

Lalkrishna Advani

By Sanjiv Acharya

When the news that BJP delegates to the national executive meet in Indore from February 17 to 19 will stay in tents, it was generally believed that the idea had been floated by the party’s brand new president, Nitin Gadkari.

As usual the media overanalysed the news and reported that after taking over as party president, Gadkari had said that “Deendayal Upadhyay and his philosophy of reaching out to the last man in the queue” would be the roadmap for every party leader which is why in a symbolic gesture he proposed that the delegates stay in tents.

Fact, however, as they say is stranger then fiction. And in this case too the story behind the story is no different.

When the BJP high command asked the Madhya Pradesh chief minister, Shivraj Singh Chouhan, to make arrangements in Bhopal for over 5,000 delegates, sources say he was a little bit worried. And understandably so. In any even of this nature it is par for the course for senior leaders to get upset with the host CM due to lack of facilities or some other reason. So it is quite natural that when a CM finds that his state has been selected for a session he tries to pass it on to some other state. Chouhan too tried to do the same by fobbing the session to Karnataka and Gujarat. But the new president has selected MP for political reasons and the best Chouhan could do was to get the session shifted from Bhopal to Indore and on to the head of his cabinet minister Kailash Vijayvargiya.

However, the Indore BJP informed the party high command that because of a large number of marriages during those dates it would be impossible to arrange for hotel rooms for the 5,000 plus delegates. It was then that LK Advani suggested that the delegates stay in tents instead of hotels.

Now it is up to Gadkari’s newly appointed political advisor to go about telling one and all that the tent fiasco was not his boss’s idea but Advani’s. He says Gadkari, “is a very practical person and understands that such gimmicks don’t impress people. It was Advani’s idea, and thus accepted.”