India’s BJP chooses new leader to ride out troubles

NEW DELHI, Sunday (Reuters)

India’s opposition, Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party named a low profile, regional politician as its new president hoping he will be able to steer the party out of a series of scandals and setbacks.

Rajnath Singh, a former federal minister and provincial chief minister, would lead the BJP until Feb. 2007, outgoing president Lal Krishna Advani told a news conference at the end of the party’s 25th anniversary celebrations in Mumbai.

“The party will make good progress under the leadership of the popular politician that Rajnath Singh is,” Advani said. “We have passed through a bad patch and am sure under Rajnath Singh we are heading for a very good patch in 2006.“I am not in the least unnerved by the ups and downs in the life of a party,” Advani said. “Our recent problems are nothing compared to what we faced in the past.”

The BJP has been struggling for direction since losing national elections in May 2004, seemingly unsure whether to pitch itself as a moderate force in Indian politics or pander to its Hindu nationalist supporters.

New president Singh said Vajpayee and Advani would continue to inspire and motivate the BJP.

“I accept this responsibility as a test of my abilities,” 54-year-old Singh said. “We will move forward under the same ideology with which we started our political journey”.

Analysts said Singh was not the answer to the BJP’s problems. “He is an answer to a very temporary problem, namely that of finding someone who would not be completely unacceptable to everyone else,” Yogendra Yadav, a political analyst at New Delhi’s Centre for the Study of Developing Societies, said.

“As far as other problems like lack of organisational coherence, lack of strategy and direction, Rajnath is not the answer and he is not supposed to be the answer,” he said.

“He has become president precisely because he is a weak leader and no one thinks he would be a long term threat to them,” Yadav added.