New Delhi: Senior BJP leaders L.K. Advani, Murli Manohar,Yashwant Sinha on Tuesday took on Prime Minister Narendra Modi and BJP president Amit Shah over the party's poor performance in the Bihar elections.
"The result of the Bihar election show that no lesson was learnt from the fiasco in Delhi," a joint statement put out by Advani, Joshi, Shanta Kumar and Yashwant Sinha said, referring to the way the Aam Aadmi Party worsted the BJP in February.
"To say that everyone is responsible for the defeat in Bihar is to ensure that no one is held responsible," the hard hitting statement said.
Advani and the others said that a review of the Bihar debacle -- where the Bharatiya Janata Party won just 53 of the 243 assembly seats -- "must not be done by the very persons who have managed and who have been responsible for the campaigning in Bihar.
"A thorough review must be done of the reasons for the defeat as well as the way the party is being forced to kowtow to a handful and how its consensual character has been destroyed."
"The review must not be done by the very persons who have managed and have been responsible for the campaign in Bihar", said the statement.
Before the statement was released from the residence of Joshi, a former BJP president, former union minister Arun Shourie and former RSS ideologue K N Govindacharya were closeted with Joshi.
The statement said the results of the Bihar election showed that no lesson has 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 the Finance Minister Arun Jaitley's defence of the leadership yesterday 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.
Copy of the Statement:
(With PTI Inputs)
