Hyderabad: BJP leader and Rajya Sabha MP Subramanian Swamy put out a tweet questioning his party’s decision to nominate ‘Metro Man’ E Sreedharan as the chief ministerial candidate in the upcoming Kerala Assembly polls.
Swamy called the decision a “convenient spin”, as word in the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) during the 2014 general elections, before Narendra Modi became Prime Minister, was that those above 75 would not be qualified for the top job. It essentially put seniors like L K Advani, Modi’s mentor, on the bench.
LK Advani was made a member of the ‘Margdarshak Mandal’ (a group of mentors) after the BJP came to power in 2014.
However, there was no age limit for contesting the Lok Sabha elections, so veterans like LK Advani and Murli Manohar Joshi were allowed to run with the clear understanding that no ministerial posts would come their way.
A lot of people even felt that this was the easiest way to retire a lot of senior people who might have been difficult to deal with or at least been inconvenient to them. With or without Swamy’s statement, the BJP’s rollback on its decision is more or less hypocrisy.
Kerala BJP chief K. Surendra on March 4 announced that Sreedharan will be the party’s chief ministerial candidate in the upcoming state Assembly polls, bu
Just hours after tweeting that E Sreedharan will be the BJP’s chief ministerial face in the upcoming Kerala state polls, union minister V Muraleedharan clarified that his party has not taken a decision on it yet. The state will witness elections on April 6.
For the Assembly poll 2021, the number of polling booths in Kerala has been extended from 21,498 to 40,771. The counting of votes will be held on May 2.