NEW DELHI: Two days after the BJP suffered a shocking defeat in Bihar, the veterans in the party have hit out at the leadership.
A joint statement by LK Advani, Murli Manohar Joshi, Shanta Kumar and Yashwant Sinha has sought a thorough review of the BJP's defeat in Bihar assembly elections, stating that the party failed to learn lessons from the fiasco in Delhi assembly elections.
"To say that everyone is responsible for the defeat is to ensure that no one is held responsible," says the statement, which has been signed by Yashwant Sinha.
The brief but strongly-worded statement says that the party has been "emasculated" in the last one year and was being "forced to kow-tow to a handful".
Interestingly, the letter which was released on Tuesday evening (November 10), was actually dated November 11.
"The review should cover the way the party has been forced to kowtow to a handful and how its consensual character has been destroyed," the statement says, adding, "the review must not be done by the very persons who have managed and have been responsible for the campaign in Bihar."
The BJP bigwigs asserted that the principal reason for the latest defeat was the way the party has been 'emasculated' in the last year.
The BJP managed to win only 53 seats in the just-concluded assembly elections.
On Monday, senior party leader Arun Jaitley refused to pinpoint the blame for loss on any one leader and had said that it was a 'collective loss' for the party.
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.
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