Grace in defeat: Advani greets PM and Sonia,quits as Leader of Oppn

BJP president Rajnath Singh said: “In the (BJP) parliamentary board meeting,Advani said he did not want to be the Leader of the Opposition,but the board insisted that he should continue. However,Advani said he should not continue. The parliamentary board has authorised me to convince Advani to change his opinion… Advani will continue to be our leader.”

While the BJP is expected to do a post-mortem on what went wrong,party general secretary Arun Jaitley said “the BJP takes its defeat as the collective responsibility of the party and not of any individual.”

But in first public comments on what led to the party’s defeat,veteran tribal leader Baliram Kashyap,who won the Bastar (ST) seat in Chhattisgarh for the fourth consecutive time,said the BJP decision to project Advani as its Prime Ministerial candidate was a “wrong decision”.

“I think it is one of the major reasons for the debacle. It did not go down well among voters,” Kashyap told newsmen outside the counting centre in Bastar after he won the seat by a margin of nearly 50,000 votes. Asked about Kashyap’s comments,Chief Minister Raman Singh told reporters in Raipur that “it could be a personal opinion”.