Hard for BJP to keep allies without Advani: Prabhu Chawla, The New Indian Express

In a chat with ET Now, Prabhu Chawla, Editorial Director, The New Indian Express shares his views on the BJP crisis. Excerpts:


ET Now: Do you see BJP splitting? What about Advani loyalists like Jaswant Singh, Sushma Swaraj or for that matter Uma Bharti?

Prabhu Chawla: Advani is raising the right question...there may not be a spilt in the party but the party machinery will become ineffective because most of the senior leaders maybe are thinking that if this is the way the party is going to be run, by cabal of leaders sitting at the top, then they will not be respected, they will not be given any important role, they will sit at home and see the party lose.

The party might become inactive. As of now, the size of the party has shrunk by almost 25% without Advani. The party without any senior leaders and without their followers will not be able to fight the Congress party. It is a tragedy that a person like Modi, who was becoming the most popular leader of India, has lost little bit of credibility because he does not enjoy the support of the senior leaders in his own party. So there is no chances of immediate split but there will be a crisis of credibility, there will be crisis of leadership, there will be crisis of acceptability, there will be crisis of ideology.

ET Now: Without Advani, will Modi be able to reach out to allies like JD-U?

Prabhu Chawla: Without Advani, there is nobody who can make the allies in favour of Modi. In fact, Advani maybe preparing a ground for him to takeover, if Advani was on his side, he would have been able to make some kind of more acceptable ground for himself. Without Advani, there are no other leaders in the BJP at the moment who can bring allies on the table. Advani is known to everybody for the last 40 years. There is no dialogue between Modi and other allies directly. But then maybe he can be a vote catcher but Modi, the kind of personality he is, he has strong enemies, he has also strong friends but he does not have a middle ground, which is much more important for winning elections