PM surprises BJP, shows up at party Hq to be with Parivar mourning for Bhandari

Manmohan Singh’s gesture was given more than one interpretation in BJP circles. Coming as it did a day after the BJP’s open attack against the Prime Minister’s handling of the Indo-Pak peace process, some saw it as a reconciliatory move aimed to signal that Manmohan Singh was a ‘‘statesman’’ who could transcend bipartisan politics and reach out to the opposition through sensitive gestures.

The more cynical view was that the Prime Minister’s move was aimed at subtly highlighting the intra-party differences that have stalked the BJP in recent months since Bhandari—towards the end of his life—had become an open and bitter critic of the BJP.

Bhandari made headlines last month by sharply attacking Narendra Modi’s handling of the Gujarat riots in February-March 2002 and ridiculing Advani’s decision to return as head of the party.

In an interview to a Hindi weekly, Bhandari had accused Modi of not doing enough to stop the riots from spreading and compared the post-Godhra riots to Mahatma Gandhi’s assassination. ‘‘If action had been taken on the first day, it would have been better… Modi’s removal was one of the ways which could have prevented the situation from deteriorating,’’ Bhandari, who was Gujarat’s Governor during the riots, had said.

He also ridiculed the leadership change in the BJP as an ‘‘Advani to Advani race.’’ It was not, therefore, Bhandari’s long innings as a dedicated RSS pracharak and BJP leader but his recent anti-party outburst that had made him important enough for the Prime Minister to pay homage to him, a section of the BJP insisted.

In a condolence resolution, the BJP today described him as a ‘‘man of ideology and idealism’’ who was known ‘‘for simple living and high thinking.’’