By Navneet Mishra
New Delhi, After a crushing defeat in the Delhi Assembly elections, the Bharatiya Janata Party is preparing to make a big change in the state organisation.
A BJP national official told IANS that the party is preparing to remove not only the state president but also other office bearers of the organisation.
After the election results, Manoj Tiwari has also taken responsibility for the defeat in a press conference at his residence on Tuesday. Although he has not revealed anything about his next move, sources hinted that he may offer his resignation to National President J.P. Nadda on moral grounds in the next few days. The party will elect the new state chief in Delhi after that.
A leader associated with the BJP’s central team told IANS: “Manoj Tiwari has completed his three-year term anyway.”
He was made the BJP state chief in November 2016. Hence, the new chief should have been declared, but due to the Delhi elections, the organisational elections were postponed. Now after the elections, a new face will be handed over the command in the national capital, the leader said.
Tiwari, who joined the BJP in 2013, climbed the ladder of success in a short span of time. In 2014, the party gave him the ticket for the Lok Sabha election from North-East Delhi and he became an MP in the “Modi wave”.
Thereafter, the party made Tiwari the state unit chief in 2016 eyeing the Purvanchali vote bank. However, many local leaders of Delhi were upset with the decision to make a mere three-year-old member the party chief in the state.
There were also reports of wrangling between Tiwari and veteran Delhi BJP leader Vijay Goel, Ramesh Bidhuri and other leaders. Tiwari, in an interview to IANS before the election, however, had denied that there was any infighting in the Delhi unit. He said that every leader is ambitious, small things keep happening.
Party sources say that during Tiwari’s tenure, the BJP won the MCD and Lok Sabha elections with a spectacular performance, but he did not contribute much to it. According to a BJP leader, the people voted for Modi in the Lok Sabha elections while the MCD has always been a BJP stronghold.
According to the BJP leader, the state chief’s ability is judged by the party’s performance in the Assembly elections. But the manner in which the party could not even touch double digit figures in the 2020 Assembly elections, the top leadership of the party thinks that it is time to give the command of the state leadership to someone who has the ability to compete with Arvind Kejriwal.
A senior BJP leader told IANS: “It is a challenge for the top leadership to create a leader who is an expert in making strategies in Delhi and is intellectually strong. If the BJP cannot come up with a leader comparable to Kejriwal then it will face the same fate even after five years”.
