Patna, Nov. 17: Asked to spell out his “hunch” about the possible outcome in Bihar, expected in any case on Tuesday, a senior BJP leader offered his astrological prediction: a hung House.

Janata Dal (United) circles not particularly fond of him believe that a section of the BJP leadership is sparing no effort to dilute the secular credentials of Nitish Kumar.

Their target, these circles believe, is not Nitish Kumar but Lal Krishna Advani. An NDA victory in Bihar would give a boost to Advani and enable him to mount another assault in Delhi.

With the Bihar results coming out at the beginning of the winter session of Parliament, a triumph of the BJP’s strategy in the state would strengthen his position within the party, they point out.

Why else, they ask, would the BJP draft the services of Murli Manohar Joshi and Uma Bharti in preference to “Bihari” stalwarts like Yashwant Sinha and Shatrughan Sinha? The latter has gone public with his criticism of the BJP fielding candidates with a “criminal past” and refused to campaign for the party.

His well-known grouse is that the BJP chose to project Nitish as the chief ministerial candidate and the party decided to contest less than half the seats.

The two Sinhas, Dal (U) sources believe, are the more acceptable faces of the BJP in the state and would have made a difference among the small but influential Kayasthas.

Dal (U) circles are also aggrieved that in rallies, leaders like Bharti have often struck a discordant note by stridently promoting Hindutva.

This, they suspect, is being done deliberately to spoil the chances of Nitish, who has not just maintained a distance from the BJP, unlike George Fernandes, but who has often been critical of the BJP’s less than liberal stand on issues related to Hindutva. His prospects, they suspect, are being deliberately and systematically sabotaged.

The last straw came in the shape of an advertisement in which Bihar had been described as a “haven” for Bangladeshi infiltrators and Pakistan-trained terrorists. Dal (U) circles insist that the advertisement was released by the BJP’s Delhi office without any consultation with them.

The Rashtriya Janata Dal pounced on the advertisement to demand an apology from Nitish, who was asked to explain his stand in public. The advertisement, the RJD claimed, was an insinuation that members of the minority community in the state were either infiltrators or terrorists.

The timing of the advertisement, released just before the third phase of polling in a large number of constituencies with sizeable Muslim population, substantially damaged the Dal (U), said agitated party leaders.

The charges were dismissed by the BJP. But the organising secretary of the state BJP, Harendra Kumar, said significantly that an RSS programme to promote Hindutva around this time had been shelved to avoid embarrassing Nitish.

The statement, however, betrayed the uneasy relationship between the two allies.