The nomination of BJP president Amit Shah for the prestigious Gandhinagar seat, represented by party’s patriarch LK Advani five times since 1998, reflects a final generational shift of the party — from the Vajpayee-Advani era to the Modi-Shah regime now.
The BJP fielding Shah in place of 92-year-old Advani is seen both as the further tightening of control over the party by the Modi-Shah duo as also for ensuring a solid showing in the home State of the Prime Minister who would yet again contest from Varanasi in Uttar Pradesh in the upcoming Lok Sabha polls.
Modi’s name has been announced by BJP’s Central Election Committee from Varanasi even as conjectures are on his contesting from a second seat as he did in 2014 from Vadodara, Gujarat. The BJP did not announce a candidate for the Puri seat in Odisha with indication that it may be the Prime Minister’s second seat which would also go to Assembly polls simultaneously.
The highlight of the announcement on Thursday evening was Shah taking over Gandhinagar seat from Advani which also means that the BJP veteran did no not ‘influence’ the selection of new candidate for the seat as was being speculated earlier. The nomination of Shah, a Rajya Sabha member, from the seat would add more political heft to his stature and suggest his taking over greater responsibility of governance at the Centre, if Narendra Modi returns to power for a second term.
At the same time, it is curtains for Advani’s active electoral career and also an official end to the Vajpayee-Advani era that harnessed and nursed a range of influential political leaders including Modi, Arun Jaitley, Sushma Swaraj and Rajnath Singh. One of the founder members of the party, Advani, who served as the Home Minister and Deputy Prime Minister, has been credited with navigating the party’s rise in the late 80s from just two seats in the 1984 Lok Sabha elections. Advani is a six-time MP, elected five times from Gandhinagar, where he garnered over 50 per cent of votes each time, and once from New Delhi.
Advani had initially opposed Modi as the BJP’s Prime Ministerial candidate but reconciled only under the larger ‘Parivar pressure’. It proved to be a swan song of his career. Modi lost no chance to put Advani and his contemporary Murli Manohar Joshi in the ‘Margdarshak Mandal’, a euphemism for ‘retirement home’ for senior party leaders, after he rode to power in 2014. There was not a single meeting of the said committee of elders, headed by no less than the Prime Minister himself, in the last five years.
Hitting the delete button on Advani’s nomination kicks up speculation on the fate of another veteran Murli Manohar Joshi, 83, who is currently MP from Kanpur after being shifted in 2014 from Varanasi from where Modi would again seek re-election.
Though the BJP officially maintained that there is no ceiling of 75 years of age for contesting Lok Sabha poll, the Modi-Shah duo looks set to bid adieu to most of the ageing party leader and look for new generation loyalists to follow their tune.
