New Delhi:
At 11.33 on Monday night, BJP leader Sushma Swaraj tweeted, "We are all united. We are all one. We will move forward with the blessings of Advaniji." She also tweeted, "There is no crisis in BJP." There seemed to be more hope there than assertion.
Till that late in the evening, Ms Swaraj and her colleagues like Arun Jaitley, Ravi Shankar Prasad and Ananth Kumar were at LK Advani's residence trying to persuade him to withdraw his resignation from party posts. BJP president Rajnath Singh and party leader Murli Dhar Rao, known to be close to Mr Advani, met him.
But the BJP's 85-year-old patriarch has so far refused to reconsider his decision. The BJP's quandary, say sources, is how to win back Mr Advani without compromising on its determination to award top billing to Narendra Modi, Chief Minister of Gujarat, who has been chosen to head the party's campaign in elections due next year.
It was at about 1 pm on Monday that Mr Advani sent his resignation letter to Rajnath Singh, in it a dark assessment of the party he helped found in 1980. "Most leaders of ours are now concerned just with their personal agendas," he wrote. He resigned from three party posts he held, a day after he was over-ruled and Mr Modi was promoted.
To an array of leaders who visited him and exhorted a reversal, he reportedly said, "Mr Modi is not the right leader for India."
On Monday evening Rajnath Singh, flanked by Arun Jaitley and Sushma Swaraj, announced that the BJP's top decision-making body, its parliamentary board, had "unanimously" rejected the stalwart's resignation. "I will not accept his resignation in any form," Mr Singh said and stressed that party "needs him and his guidance more today than ever before."
But despite all the overtures to Mr Advani, sources say, the BJP is unlikely to reconsider Mr Modi's elevation to chief of the BJP's election campaign committee, a move reportedly driven by the party's powerful ideological mentor, the Rashtriya Swayamsewak Sangh or RSS, which has crossed Mr Advani for repeatedly suggesting that he must step aside to allow younger leaders to take over.