Rival calls Raje 'autocratic', cribs to Rajnath

While the BJP is fighting to win back power in Rajasthan, the battle within its state unit for leadership is not yet over. In a letter written by former treasurer of Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) Sunil Bhargava to president Rajnath Singh complained about ‘autocratic’ ways of state chief Vasundhara Raje which is detrimental to the party interests in the state.

Bharghava had returned to Jaipur on Wednesday from Nagpur after apprising the RSS and former national president Nitin Gadkari of the party affairs in Rajasthan.

While talking to Deccan Herald he said he is fighting for the honour of the genuine party workers which is denied under the present dispensation.     

He said his endeavour is for a course correction in the party functioning as in the present style of functioning the real workers are given the boots while opportunists are getting rewarded.

 Bhargava added that  he has written a letter to party president urging him to not allow the saffron outfit to be “hijacked by few individuals who not only do not adhere to the party’s ideology, but ostracise other loyal workers too.”

 “When we held the flag of BJP and the Sangh for the first time as young recruits, we didn’t pay heed to trivial materialistic considerations. The only common feeling was that of serving the motherland without any materialistic profit,” the letter said.

“But now, loyal workers who have devoted their lives to the cause of the party are being rejected in favour of few who joined politics for personal gains,” reads an extract from the explosive letter by Bhargava, who didn’t find place in Raje’s newly-constituted poll team in the state.

 “We are being rejected because people at the top don’t like our faces. They do not have an iota of knowledge about the party’s ideology, its history and are only working for profit,” the letter said.

“If corrective action is not taken, they could prove detrimental to the party’s prospects in assembly and Lok Sabha polls,” the note, which Bhargava is personally said to have also handed over at Sangh headquarters in Nagpur, said.

 It is believed that Bhargava’s reservations on Raje stem from the former CM’s ‘appeasement politics’ as she is  trying to woo the  BJP leaders who left the party, which is clearly not acceptable to other hardliners like him.

In fact, Raje has managed to win back a considerable number of party rebels who left the party during the last assembly elections  during her Suraj Sankalp Yatra rallies, much to the dislike of the leaders who stood with the party during good and bad times.