New Delhi:
Narendra Modi's absence in the heat and dust of the Uttar Pradesh elections has made more news than the presence of many others. Is the BJP's star campaigner sulking? Not at all, says party president Nitin Gadkari, Mr Modi is merely too busy. The BJP chief also emphatically states that Mr Modi remains one of party's top candidates for Prime Minister.
Speaking exclusively to NDTV, Mr Gadkari said the Gujarat Chief Minister had not been seen campaigning in UP, and indeed and in Punjab and Uttarakhand, as he had been kept busy by politics in his state. "Modi has kept away from UP because he is very busy with the Sadbhavana programme and other state politics," the BJP chief said, adding that the party had requested Mr Modi to campaign for it, but the Gujarat Chief Minister has conveyed that he has no time to do so.
Mr Modi's Sadhbhavna campaign, that took hm across Gujarat fasting for communal amity, ended on February 12. There have been three phases of voting in UP since but no sign of Mr Modi. His keeping away from the elections is being seen as another episode in an ongoing clash of big egos, ever since Mr Gadkari inducted his arch rival Sanjay Joshi, who was in political exile for six years after an mms scandal, into the team planning the UP campaign last year, much to Mr Modi's chagrin. The Gujarat CM showed his displeasure then too by staying away from a BJP national executive meeting where Mr Joshi was prominently present.
Mr Modi wants Mr Joshi out, Mr Gadkari is said to be equally adamant that Mr Joshi shall stay. But the "head of the family" is all patient patriarch when he says that the Gujarat CM's absence is not an act of indiscipline. Asked if he is angry or disappointed, Mr Gadkari deftly avoids comment saying that those words do not belong in his dictionary. For any more, he suggests some of these questions are also thrown at Mr Modi.
To bolster his Modi-is-busy-not-sulking point, Mr Gadkari offers that "many of the BJP's other 8 CMs didn't campaign in UP" after all. But then those CMs were not one of the BJP's stated candidates for prime minister. Mr Gadkari smiles when he says that Mr Modi remains one among the BJP's top five or six Prime Ministerial candidates for the 2014 General Elections. He has a string of lavish epithets too - Mr Modi he says is "role-model CM" and is a "good performer who has done some excellent work". And yes, Mr Gadkari says, he is not talking to Mr Modi through a conduit. "I have talked to him," he confirms.
Is there strategy behind this sanguine acceptance? For while the Gujarat CM is reportedly in great demand with BJP candidates and workers in UP, party strategists are reportedly not too sure that it is such a bad deal. For after three phases of elections in UP, party pundits reportedly assess that the Congress's high-pitched wooing of Muslims - the package for weavers, the sub quota for backward Muslims - has divided the 18% vote of the community between the Samajwadi Party, the BSP and the Congress. The BJP also reckons that the Muslims are voting for candidates on merit with no shrill Hindutva campaign to polarise them.
So is the absence of Mr Modi or others like Pilibhit MP Varun Gandhi being seen as an advantage for the BJP? Mr Gadkari refuses to analyse the elections "politically" stoutly saying that every leader of his party is doing his or her best. "All have tried their best, some are busy," he says.
Watch entire interview here