BJP seeks to end tie-up with JDU

NEW DELHI, NOV 4: The Bharatiya Janata Party BJP unit in Karnataka has asked the party's central leadership to allow it to go it alone ...

NEW DELHI, NOV 4: The Bharatiya Janata Party BJP unit in Karnataka has asked the party8217;s central leadership to allow it to go it alone in the panchayat elections slated to be held sometime in the next six months.State unit leaders have told the Bharatiya Janata Party national executive that they want the tie-up it had with the Janata Dal United for the Assembly and Lok Sabha elections discontinued.

However, the BJP will not put up a candidate for the Bellary Lok Sabha constituency where an election has been necessitated following Congress president Sonia Gandhi giving up the seat. Under the seat-sharing pact, the seat was to have been contested by the JDUnited. But with Sonia contesting from Bellary, the JDUnited agreed to the candidature of BJP candidate Sushma Swaraj.

According to Karnataka BJP chief BS Yediyurappa, since the alliance with the JDUnited continued at the national level the BJP would not put up a candidate against the JDUnited for the Lok Sabha seat.

In their report to thenational executive on the election debacle, Yediyurappa and BJP national secretary Basavaraj Patil Sedam said that despite the State unit8217;s opposition, the alliance with the JDUnited was thrust upon it.

They said that the BJP would have certainly fared better had it contested the elections with either the Lok Shakti or on its own. Citing an instance to support their argument, they said that in Bidar where the JDUnited did not have a major influence the BJP had won not only the Lok Sabha seat butalso six of the eight Assembly seats falling under it.

The two leaders also blamed JDUnited leaders Ramakrishna Hegde and George Fernandes for pressurising the BJP central leadership into accepting the alliance which failed to take off. The calculation that the alliance would garner a 60 per cent vote share based on the vote shares the BJP, Lok Shakti and the undivided Janata Dal got in the 1998 Lok Sabha elections went awry. It was able to get only a 40 per cent share this time, they said.

The alliancecould also not benefit from the expectation that the JDUnited would be able to attract a section of the minority votes. The majority of the minority votes went to the Congress, they said.