New Delhi, December 20
The seven month-old war between the RSS and LK Advani seems to have come to an end, at least temporarily with the change of guard and the ascendancy of GenNext to the top posts of the party, culminating in Nitin Gadkari’s appointment as BJP president here yesterday.

A day earlier Advani became chairman of the BJP parliamentary party, paving way for Sushma Swaraj and Arun Jaitley to be de jure leaders of the party in the two Houses of Parliament. The occasion was marked by much ostentation and celebration. While quitting their respective posts both Advani and outgoing president Rajnath Singh expressed great sense of relief and the same sense of relief was visible among the BJP workers at 11, Ashoka Road, who seemed eager to put behind them the acrimony and bad blood in the BJP which started with the defeat in the general elections leading to leader after leader sniping at each other and the party appearing demoralised, despondent.

The BJP would now like to believe that all that was a thing of the past and a new leader, the youngest ever president of the BJP, Nitin Gadkari, at the age of 52, would be able to generate new energy and vitality.

Gadkari a direct appointee of the RSS, is young and as Advani stated in his brief speech yesterday, his specialty is infrastructure and highways. Gadkari, as Advani pointed out, is known in home state Maharashtra as the Highway Gadkari, the man who built the Mumbai-Pune Highway and paved concrete roads in hometown Nagpur, starting with one outside the RSS headquarters.

Gadkari himself is proud of his achievements and in his first speech here mentioned how as Maharashtra PWD minister in the Shiv Sena-BJP government he managed to build the Mumbai-Pune Highway starting with virtually no money in his kitty and he proudly announced, “Where there is a will there is a way, where there is no will, there are only conferences, discussions and seminars.” In effect, he exuded much confidence in his ability to put the BJP house here in Delhi in order.

But perhaps it takes much more to run a large national political party than just the ability to procure finances and build roads. As Gadkari admitted yesterday, “I am new here, I have never spent a night in Delhi for last five years.” He also proudly mentioned how he has successfully run several NGOs and is quite adept at running cooperative sugar mills and power units.

Apart from factionalism and demoralisation that he has to contend with, the one most important issue he has to resolve is the direction in which the party should move. His predecessor Rajnath Singh failed to resolve the pulls from opposite directions by the RSS, which wanted him to return to the original Hindutva agenda, in effect reiteration of Bharat being a Hindu Rashtra on one hand and Advani and his band wanting to tone down the shrill Hindutva sloganeering to enable the BJP to continue leading NDA.