ISAS Briefs

A little over two months ago, on 22 January 2013, the President of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), Nitin Gadkari, who was under a cloud of corruption allegations, was hustled out to make way for a party veteran and former party chief, Rajnath Singh. It was during Singh's earlier tenure as president of India's main opposition party from 2005-2009 that Gujarat Chief Minister Narendra Modi was dropped from the BJP's Parliamentary Board, the party's apex decision-making body. One of the reasons given then for the dropping of Modi was that there was a conflict of interest between being a state chief minister as well as being on the panel to select election candidates. The real reason, many felt, was that some senior BJP leaders had felt threatened by Modi.