Allahabad: The Bharatiya Janata Party will not finalise its chief ministerial candidate for Uttar Pradesh polls at its two-day national executive meeting but let its parliamentary board take a call on it, party leaders said on Saturday.
BJP leaders have made it clear that the parliamentary board will take the call on the chief ministerial candidate closer to the assembly elections in the first half of 2017. Both the timing and selection will be determined by how the state politics unravels in the days ahead, they added.
"The chief ministerial candidate will be declared by the parliamentary board. Since the national executive is being held at Kumbh Nagari we are sending a message to people across the country that the BJP is going to win UP and other states," BJP national general secretary Arun Singh said.
According to Singh, the party has met with electoral success both when it declared a CM face before the polls, and when it did not.
"We have declared faces in some states and we have not declared faces at times. We need to decide whether we need to announce a CM face, when we have been successful in both formats," Singh added.
The two-day session beginning in Allahabad on Sunday, which will be attended by Prime Minister Narendra Modi and party president Amit Shah, will instead focus on the achievements of the NDA government and will strategise on expanding the party's base in the crucial poll-bound state.
Ahead of the meet, billboards have come up across Allahabad seeking to project the claims of Sultanpur MP Varun Gandhi and UP BJP president Keshav Prasad Maurya. Other names like HRD minister Smriti Irani and Gorakhpur MP Yogi Adityanath are also doing the rounds.
Yet another possibility being discussed is that of Home Minister Rajnath Singh spearheading the charge as campaign committee chief.
After the success in Assam where it had announced Sarbananda Sonowal as its CM face, a section of the party strongly believes that BJP should clearly and categorically project its leadership before the UP electorate.
Many in the BJP believe that any ambiguity on this could lead to confusion both among the cadres and voters, as was perhaps the case in Bihar. The two main rivals, Samajwadi Party and Bahujan Samaj Party, have their CM candidates in Akhilesh Yadav and Mayawati respectively.
But all concerns are unlikely to be addressed immediately, with the party in a mood to wait and watch before taking a final call on its CM face.
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