In what could ruffle feathers within the Bharatiya Janata Party, senior leader Murli Manohar Joshi on Sunday said there was no “Modi wave” in the country and dismissed the applicability of the “Gujarat model of development' in other States.
Dr. Joshi, who was forced to vacate his preferred Varanasi seat for Narendra Modi, said: “Mr. Modi is the representative of the party as a prime ministerial candidate. It's not a highly personalised thing. It is a representative wave.”
“Mr. Modi gets the support from different parts of the country, from different sections of the society and from all leaders of the BJP,” the senior leader and BJP's Kanpur candidate told TV channel Manorama News.
Rebuffing the Gujarat model of development, Dr. Joshi said he did not favour a “one State or a straitjacket model” of development. He said the development model pursued by the BJP-led NDA, if it came to power, would be a “development model of the country as presented by the BJP for the nation as a whole.”
“In a country like India, what model is true for Jammu and Kashmir or Arunachal Pradesh will not be true for Kerala,” he said adding that the good points from each State would be incorporated.
Commenting on the expulsion of senior leader Jaswant Singh, Dr. Joshi said the decision to deny a ticket to Mr. Singh was not a collective one and his expulsion could have been avoided, adding that the decision was taken by party president Rajnath Singh and Rajasthan Chief Minister Vasundhara Raje.
