Rajnath Singh in Mumbai on Monday. (PTI)

New Delhi, June 9: The trial of strength by secret ballot that yesterday helped Bihar deputy chief minister retain his post has thrown up several uncomfortable questions for the BJP’s central leadership.

Senior leaders are aware of the perils of this system and so insist that this one-time exception will not be treated as a precedent.

Although some argue that the decision to settle the issue through voting by legislators showed the BJP’s inner-party democracy, the dominant view is the move was fraught with dangerous possibilities and signalled the inability of the central leaders to resolve a crisis through persuasion.

“This decision was taken under duress,” a senior leader conceded in private. “We didn’t rejoice at the spectacle at all.”

Many leaders fear that dissidents in Uttarakhand and Rajasthan might now feel encouraged to try their luck.

In Uttarakhand, senior leader Bhagat Singh Koshiyari is unhappy with chief minister B.C. Khanduri and even claims support of a majority of the MLAs. Koshiyari had called for a trial of strength through secret ballot to choose the chief minister but his demand was rejected.

In Rajasthan, chief minister Vasundhara Raje Scindia faces widespread dissidence and the Bihar example might well have given the rebels in Jaipur an idea.

The central leadership has been crushing demands for similar strength trials with brute force. Uma Bharti’s case is the most striking example as she had sought a vote to decide if Shivraj Singh Chauhan enjoyed majority support in Madhya Pradesh.

Uma was bluntly told to abide by the high command’s diktat.

Central leaders say the BJP has always been “a party with a difference” and discipline has been one of its defining principles. But the Bihar episode has exposed the declining authority of the high command, as the rebellious legislators listened neither to party president Rajnath Singh nor L.K. Advani.

This has raised serious questions about the plight of the high command itself in the post-Vajpayee era.

The rift between Rajnath and Arun Jaitley is common knowledge and a series of events in the recent past have shown that Advani has failed to rise above factional interests.

A middle-rung leader said: “The growing discontent in states can be a reflection of the disunited centre.”