World | India
Raje agrees to quit party post after by-elections
Her battle with BJP chief rajnath likely to end soon
- By Ajay Jha, Chief Correspondent
- Published: 00:00 October 22, 2009
New Delhi: The battle between the Bharatiya Janata Party chief Rajnath Singh and former Rajasthan chief minister Vasundhara Raje is likely to end soon with Raje agreeing to quit as legislative party leader in Rajasthan.
Raje's steadfast approach of sticking to the post despite formal orders to step down had put a big question mark over Singh's authority towards the end of his tenure slated in December end.
Following the party's poor performance in May's Lok Sabha elections, Singh asked Raje to quit in August and got the parliamentary board to approve his decision. Raje, however, questioned the decision by asking why no central leader of the party opted to resign for the same reason.
Enjoying majority support of the state legislators, Raje kept the party on tenterhooks for close to two and a half months before indicating her willingness to step down in the first half of November.
The Singh-Raje fracas, incidentally, exposed dwindling hold of the veteran leader Lal Krishna Advani over the party in the twilight of his political career since the parliamentary board, the highest decision making body of BJP, preferred to ignore his appeal to rescind its earlier decision of asking Raje to quit when it met in the capital yesterday.
The BJP parliamentary board gathered to discuss the possible post-poll scenario on the eve of counting of votes in three states that went to polls on October 12.
However, realising that it stood no chance of coming to power in Haryana or Arunachal Pradesh, it ended up discussing briefly the permutations and combinations that would be required in the unlikely event of the BJP-Shiv Sena combine emerging the single largest group in Maharashtra before taking up the issue of Raje's defiance.
A wily Raje, however, had already informed Advani and some other leaders close to her that she would quit the post after November 7 by-elections for two assembly seats in Rajasthan, rendering the parliamentary board meeting a fruitless exercise.
Raje was already on her way to New Delhi when the parliamentary board started its meeting. She is expected to call on Sushma Swaraj, the deputy leader of opposition in the Lok Sabha, today to handover a post-dated resignation.
Raje was supposed to do so last month itself. Although she reached Delhi, it was her parliamentarian son Dushyant Singh who called on party vice-president M. Venkaiah Naidu to inform that his mother had taken ill and would be unable to meet him.
The mystery illness, supposed to be a delaying tactics, only ended up frustrating Singh, who took the risk of his life on Tuesday by getting his small chartered aircraft take off with the help of motor vehicle lights at Dumka in Jharkhand state since Dumka airport is not equipped for landing and take off after sunset, to reach Delhi in time for the parliamentary board meeting.
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