Still recovering from the bruises inflicted on the party over the vikas purush/lauh purush thesis, the National Election Campaign Committee of the BJP today sought to focus on state-level leaders rather than revisit the controversy whether Vajpayee alone or the Vajpayee-Advani duo will lead the poll campaign in the Assembly elections.The two-hour meeting was presided over by party chief Venkaiah Naidu and attended by several Generation Next leaders — among them Pramod Mahajan, Rajnath Singh, Ananth Kumar, Ravi Shankar Prasad and Sanjay Joshi. However, contrary to expectations, neither Naidu nor Mahajan addressed the press conference after the meeting and left the task to party spokesman Mukhtar Naqvi who was accompanied by the freshly inducted additional spokesman Prakash Jawadekar.Naqvi sidestepped queries on who would lead the election campaign by focusing on the leadership in each state. He said in Madhya Pradesh, it was ‘‘Uma Bharati versus Digvijay Singh’’, in Rajashthan ‘‘Vasundhara versus Gehlot’’, in Delhi ‘‘Madanlal Khurana versus Sheila Dikshit’’ and in Chhattisgarh ‘‘BJP versus Congress.’’ The last formulation confirmed that the party had not resolved the leadership issue in the state and no chief ministerial candidate would be projected in the poll campaign.Alongwith state-level leaders, it is state-level issues which will form the focus of the campaign. The BJP will have separate manifestos for each state but national issues, such as the various achievements of the Vajpayee government at the Centre, will also be highlighted, Naqvi said. Even in face of repeated queries, Naqvi refused to state whether the party’s pet issues such as Ram temple will also be included in the state manifestos. He said the question was open and ‘‘when the manifesto is released, you will know what it contains.’’Although the party has repeatedly said that development and governance will be its main focus and the Vajpayee Government’s achievements its principal poll plank, the fact that the BJP is not in power in any of the four states going to the polls means that it will run a negative rather than a positive campaign. In other words, the focus will be on the ‘‘misrule’’ and ‘‘malgovernance’’ by the respective Congress governments in the states.To this effect, the campaign committee has decided to prepare ‘‘chargesheets’’ against each of the four state governments and the former journalist and present BJP ideologue and MP, Balbir Punj, has been entrusted with the task of drafting the chargesheets.Each state has also been assigned to a group of three leaders (including one organisation man, one minister, and one for publicity) who will coordinate different aspects of the election campaign. For MP, the three are Sanjay Joshi, Arun Jaitley, and Amitabh Sinha. For Rajasthan — Babulal Marandi, Rajnath Singh, and Prabhat Jha. For Chhattisgarh — Pramod Mahajan, Ravishankar Prasad, and Dinanath Mishra, and for Delhi — M.A. Naqvi, Ananth Kumar, and Siddharta Nath Singh.
