NEW DELHI: Rumblings from the Bihar debacle hit the corridors of power in Delhi on Tuesday where knives were out in the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) against Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s leadership. Senior leaders Lal Kishan Advani and Murli Manohar Joshi said he could not take credit for every victory without accepting blame for every defeat.

Two other leaders also raised the banner of revolt against the leadership of Mr Modi.

In a terse statement in the wake of the Bihar rout they said that the party had been ‘emasculated’ in the last one year and was being “forced to kowtow to a handful”.

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In the first major challenge to Mr Modi since he emerged as the undisputed leader of the party and the government in May last year, the veterans, including former Himachal Pradesh chief minister Shanta Kumar and former finance minister Yashwant Sinha, issued a brief but strongly-worded statement that demanded a thorough review of the debacle. There were reports of some BJP MPs from Mr Modi’s stronghold of Gujarat also joining the apparent revolt.

“The principal reason for the latest defeat is the way the party has been emasculated in the last year,” the senior leaders said in their statement.

“A thorough review must be done of the reasons for the defeat as well as of the way the party is being forced to kowtow to a handful, and how its consensual character has been destroyed,” the statement said.

Before the statement was released from the residence of Mr Joshi, a former BJP president, former union minister Arun Shourie and former RSS ideologue K.N. Govindacharya were closeted with Mr Joshi.

The statement said the results of the Bihar election showed that no lesson had been learnt from the fiasco in Delhi, where the Aam Aadmi Party trounced BJP by securing 67 of the 70 assembly seats.

“To say that everyone is responsible for the defeat in Bihar is to ensure that no-one is held responsible. It shows those who would have appropriated credit if the party had won are bent on shrugging off responsibility for the disastrous showing in Bihar,” it said.

The statement is an apparent dig at Finance Minister Arun Jaitley’s defence of the leadership on Monday after the Parliamentary Board’s review of the performance in which he had said “as far as accountability is concerned the party wins collectively and loses collectively”.

He was reacting to a query whether party chief Amit Shah would be held responsible for the defeat.

The statement echoed strong sentiments vented by Mr Shourie soon after the Bihar debacle. He said the troika of Modi, Shah and Jaitley should be held accountable for BJP’s loss in Bihar elections. Mr Shourie predicted that the “silent non-cooperation movement” in the party against the leadership would now deepen.

The marginalised BJP leader and movie star, Shatrughan Sinha, expressed similar thoughts. In fact, Mr Sinha said he was happy that Bihar had got a good leadership in the Lalu Prasad Yadav and Nitish Kumar alliance.

Mr Shourie berated the “Modi-centric” campaign. It “lacked credibility” because of the unkept promises of the past. He also blamed BJP’s “divisive tactics” for the drubbing.

Mr Shourie, a minister in the Vajpayee government, who is no longer with the party, accused Mr Shah and Mr Jaitley of ‘fomenting’ a coalition against Mr Modi by forcing the other opposition parties, commanding over 69 per cent of vote, to get into an alliance.

He said the BJP had come to power at the height of Mr Modi’s popularity with merely 31pc votes.

“It is Modi, the master strategist (Shah) and Jaitley,” he said when asked who should be held responsible for the defeat. “There is no fourth person in the party or the government.”

Asked what went wrong with the party’s Bihar campaign, he said, ‘everything’.

Elaborating his comments, he said “a Modi-centric campaign, a divisive campaign and the campaign lacked credibility as promises of the past have not been kept”.

In this context, he referred to Mr Modi’s claim during Lok Sabha poll campaign that everybody would get Rs1.5 million with the amount of black money he would bring to India if he was voted to power.

And then their party president said it was a ‘jumla’, so people would obviously not take “you seriously when you make new promises”, he added.

Asked about the implications of the loss for the party and the government, he said: “The silent non-cooperation movement against them (Modi, Shah, Jaitley) will deepen. In the government, bureaucracy will also not be forthcoming.”

Once an avid supporter of Mr Modi, Mr Shourie has turned into a sharp critic of his government and the party. He bitterly complained the other day that Hindutva supporters followed by Mr Modi on the social media had abused his disabled son.

Published in Dawn, November 11th, 2015