Ranchi: The suspense over who the next Chief Minister of Jharkhand will go on for at least one more day. The BJP parliamentary board met today to decide on a name.
Undecided on the Chief Minister for Jharkhand, the BJP will send a team to Ranchi to meet MLA's.
According to reports, front runners for the post is Raghubar Das and not Arjun Munda.
Meanhile the party itself seems divided on the candidate. While Gadkari and Advani prefer Raghubar Das - as he was already Deputy Chief Minister in the Shibu Soren government, former BJP president Rajnath Singh prefers Arjun Munda, who is the General Secretary in team Gadkari.
Meanwhile the Jharkhand Mukti Morcha (JMM) wants a tribal for the top post but an attempt is on to convince JMM to drop this demand.
The BJP central leadership, which was said to be keen on having a non-tribal chief minister in Jharkhand, may have to settle for a tribal face to keep intact its support base as well as its flock of MLAs together.
Jharkhand, formed in 2000, has never had a non-tribal chief minister. Thirty-two per cent of the population in the state is tribal while 15 per cent are Muslims.
The Shibu Soren-led Jharkhand government was hit by a crisis after BJP decided to withdraw support on April 28 after the JMM leader voted against the opposition-sponsored cut motions in the Lok Sabha.
However, the BJP kept the decision on hold after Shibu's son Hemant Soren wrote to the party leadership expressing support for a BJP-led government.
A proposal by JMM for a rotational chief ministership was rejected by the BJP. Both the BJP and the JMM are against the state coming under a spell of President's Rule fearing this may break their ranks.
Though a section within BJP central leadership is keen that Yashwant Sinha becomes the Chief Minister, it does not want to antagonise the tribal voters who have started drifting towards JMM and Babulal Marandi's JVM-P.
BJP has already pledged two extra ministerial berths to JMM - taking their number to five in the cabinet - during the recent negotiations leaving just three seats for the party. At least one of these will have to go to a tribal MLA but this may not be enough.
With PTI inputs