New Delhi: A young leader of the Bharatiya Janata Party from Assam has resigned disillusioned by what he said was the “subversion of democratic tradition in the government and party.”
Prodyut Bora, who founded BJP’s highly successful IT cell, Wednesday resigned from the National Executive Committee and primary membership of the party.
He said that the party was no more a party with a difference. “Madness has gripped the party. The desire to win at any cost has destroyed the very ethos of the party. This is not the party I joined in 2004,” Bora told the Economic Times after sending his resignation letter to BJP president Amit Shah.
He said he had lost hope from the BJP under its present dispensation. “The country needs a different kind of political alternative. It is up to the BJP to be that or people will look for choices,” Bora said, adding that though he had got offers from the Assam units of Congress, AAP and the AGP to join, he was not keen to take them up.
In his fourpage detailed resignation letter, 40yearold Bora raised uncomfortable questions about the style of functioning of Narendra Modi and Shah. He said that Modi had “damaged the democratic tradition of the country where the PM is the first among equals in the Cabinet system and not the first among unequals.”
In the scathing letter, the Assam leader also questioned Shah about his “highly individualized/centralized style of decisionmaking” that was making many party office bearers feel highly disempowered. “In any organization, the style of the leader is quickly copied by those below him/her. What I am seeing in the party ,at least in my state, is the flowering of junior Amit Shahs, with a tenth of your capability and ten times your arrogance,” Bora wrote.
The young leader also could not come to terms with the fact that Assam was not only on the periphery cartographically but also in the mind space of the national leadership. He wondered what had happened to Modi’s election promise of sending the Bangladeshi illegal migrants packing from Assam.