Samikhsya Bureau
It will be intresting to watch how the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) president Amit Shah is going to design his attack and expand the road to Mission 120 in Odisha — whether he will be as hard-nosed as he was earlier or he will toe the line Prime Minister Narendra Modi has adopted towards Naveen Patnaik.
‘Willing to wound, afraid to strike’ is the strategy both Modi and Patnaik seem to have chosen as an easy path. But, from day one Shah had maintained a bellicose approach towards the Naveen-led Biju Janata Dal and his each filibustering had appeared different than other hardliners within.
Months to go for the general elections it would be an underestimation to assume that Shah would be dealing with the BJD by any moderate line of attack. To fill the vacuum created by earlier visits by the Prime Minister, Shah may rather sharpen the barbs taking on directly on Patnaik over the slew of schemes and tell people more in detail about the lofty rhetoric and the hard reality of their benefit to the people at the grass-root.
Obviously, there were reasons for frustration for the local cadres and leaders of the BJP from the recent three visits of Modi and Shah must be prepared for a session for the display of triumphalism and self back patting exercise by use of harder or may be unseemly use of tirades at Patnaik. But the BJP must take a lesson or two from its past experience from the last assembly polls in which extreme diabolic produced the wrong dividend.
It is absolutely a misplaced notion that the BJP is the second ranking party after the BJD. There has been no occasion so far to test the mantle except the last rural polls, which had lent a ringside seat to the BJP.
