However, the party managed to bring Nishank on the second and final day of the meet and made him the national vice president. He was personally ushered into the venue by Lal Krishna Advani.

The BJP patriarch’s move to take help of Nitish Kumar, and no other chief minister of his own party, has annoyed many in the rank and file. Many objective party leaders are questioning Advani’s wisdom in ignoring chief minister like Shivraj Singh Chauhan, who has carved out his own space within the party. The general feeling is that he may assure more seats in Lok Sabha than his Bihar counterpart in 2014. Has Uma Bharati factor prevented Advani from doing so? May be.

For the first time in the last so many years Advani, has in his speech, not taken the name of Narendra Modi, and Gujarat Model of development. This is a significant departure from the BJP’s position. The message is loud and clear.

Contrast this situation with the June 12-13, 2010 national executive of the BJP which was held in Patna. Not a single speaker at the public meeting in Gandhi Maidan on June 13 took the name of Bihar chief minister. Only Advani took his name for a couple of times stating how Nitish came to the national executive of the party in Mumbai a couple of months before the 1996 Lok Sabha election. None of the speaker gave credit to Nitish Kumar for “the development of Bihar”. Instead they all praised deputy chief minister Sushil Kumar Modi.

The Gujarat chief minister was then given the maximum time to speak and he spoke on all the issues––national and international.

Many political observers thought that the BJP in fact declared in Patna’s national executive itself that Modi is its prime ministerial candidate as he spoke more than Advani and was treated like the VIP. This was only a day after Nitish cancelled the dinner to the BJP leaders when a newspaper advertisement appeared showing him and Gujarat chief minister hand-in-hand.

More than a year later the situation is quite different. Nitish has suddenly become the darling of many BJP leaders and they are not willing to publicly take name of the Gujarat chief minister.

This happens in power politics. But nobody ever thought that the BJP would squander the present golden opportunity by quarrelling openly in such an ugly manner. Political observers pity the falling stature of none else but Advani, who is now pining his hope on Nitish, who can at best assure just 20 MPs––all from Bihar.

The Advani–Nitish tie-up does not mean that the stature of the latter has increased too. The tussle within the BJP, if it aggravates further, is going to have its impact on Nitish’s stature too. There is no dearth of BJP leaders at the lower level in Bihar who openly supports Narendra Modi and calls Nitish the newspaper tiger, who can not win election wihout the BJP cadres. The pro-Modi faction in the BJP will leave no stone unturned to sabotage Nitish if they feel that he would threaten the prospect of the Gujarat chief minister.

A section of the BJP machinery has started propagating that Nitish’s government is not free of corruption. In private they are working overtime to malign his image.

But Modi too is not on comfortable wicket outside Gujarat. The arrest of IPS officer Sanjeev Bhatt and subsequent developments have angered several leaders. Nitish would try to use it before his Muslim votebank.

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