LK Advani's humiliation continues? BJP patriarch quits NDA chairman's room

The Bharatiya Janata Party and the Rashtriya Swayamsewak Sangh may have successfully defused a likely major embarrassment during the election campaign by ensuring that party patriarch LK Advani was eventually able to keep his Gandhinagar Lok Sabha constituency, but it appears that the BJP’s prime ministerial candidate of 2009 who openly voiced his dissent against Narendra Modi’s candidature for the top job in 2014, will still have to reckon with the consequences of the new power equations in the party. Not only is Advani now not sitting in the Lok Sabha seat traditionally occupied by the prime minister’s immediate deputy or the No 2 in the government pecking order, but he also appears to have been shown the door as NDA chairman. [caption id=“attachment_1533709” align=“alignleft” width=“380”] LK Advani and Narendra Modi. PTI photo[/caption] Through the tenure of the 15th Lok Sabha, Advani has spent Parliament recesses in a room bearing a plaque that says ‘Acting Chairman of the NDA’. On Wednesday as Lok Sabha broke for lunch after MPs were sworn in, Advani reportedly found the plaque removed from his room. The 86-year-old veteran spent lunch recess in the room occupied until now by Gopinath Munde as deputy leader of the BJP in Lok Sabha. Advani has been acting chairman of the NDA ever since Atal Behari Vajpayee took ill. In 2009, when Sushma Swaraj was made leader of the Opposition in the Lok Sabha in place of Advani, he moved into the NDA chairman’s room. A report in The Times of India said Advani no longer uses the NDA chairman’s room in a decision prompted by the “lingering uncertainty” over his continuance as leader of the BJP-led NDA. “No decision has been taken on who should head the NDA, but one strong view in the party has it that the responsibility should be vested in the prime minister to duck any danger of the emergence of a rival power of centre. This school cites that during the last NDA tenure, both roles were combined in the then PM Atal Bihari Vajpayee precisely for the same fear,” the report says. Other reports suggested that Advani had decided of his own accord to stop using the NDA chairman’s room, given the vibes he has been getting from the leadership. Advani appears aware of the “complexity” of the situation, one report said. If the humiliation of the party patriarch now appears complete, there is more. Unlike on Wednesday. Advani did not occupy the seat next to Prime Minister Narendra Modi in the Lok Sabha on Thursday. (This is where the de factor No 2 in the Cabinet sits traditionally.) Instead, Advani sat on the front row along with senior Union ministers Sushma Swaraj, Rajnath Singh and Ram Vilas Paswan. In fact, Advani was seen apparently asking Parliamentary Affairs Minister M Venkaiah Naidu that he be allowed to sit in the second row but was finally convinced to take a front row seat. On Friday, when the new Speaker was elected, Advani’s supporters would have been sulking, no doubt – they had reportedly lobbied for the Speaker’s position to be given to Advani, but the Modi government has picked Sumitra Mahajan instead. Meanwhile, the Modi government is also trying to rehabilitate other party seniors who missed out on Cabinet berths due to the 75 years age ceiling fixed by the party for ministers. The UPA government had in 2004 sacked four BJP-leaning politicians as governors of Uttar Pradesh, Haryana, Gujarat and Goa. A phased removal of some states’ governors is now on the cards, said a report in The Times of India . Senior BJP leaders Murli Manohar Joshi, Yashwant Sinha and VK Malhotra are among those who could fill the vacancies in Raj Bhavans, the report said.