Narendra Modi (top) and Nitish Kumar at the chief ministers’ conference in New Delhi on Wednesday. (AP)

New Delhi, June 5: Narendra Modi is set to be anointed as the head of the BJP’s campaign committee for the 2014 general election.

BJP president Rajnath Singh is expected to make an announcement at the end of the Goa national executive this week after a tortuous prelude that uncovered the intense internal jousting for the Prime Minister’s post even before the party had a realistic sense of its national prospects.

Although Modi’s formal declaration as the party’s prime-ministerial candidate may wait a bit longer, the new mandate expected to be handed out in Goa will, for all intent and purpose, legitimise his national pre-eminence as the countdown for the next Lok Sabha election begins.

“Modiji didn’t want lunch so I offered the best fruits I could, including the sweetest grapes in town, so that he did not leave with a sour aftertaste,” Rajnath told reporters after the chief minister called on him this afternoon.

The clincher for Rajnath was the BJP’s victory in all the six by-elections in Gujarat that included two Lok Sabha and four Assembly seats. What made the victory delectable was each of these seats was wrested from the Congress. It pushed up the BJP’s tally in the Gujarat Assembly to 119, two more than the 117 Modi got in 2007.

Modi’s success was magnified by the setback suffered by his bugbear and Bihar chief minister Nitish Kumar in the Maharajganj Lok Sabha constituency. Prabhunath Singh of Lalu Prasad’s RJD defeated JD(U)’s P.K. Shahi — Bihar’ s education minister and a trusted lieutenant of Nitish — by a huge margin of 1,37,126 votes. In the 2009 Lok Sabha elections, the RJD had won the seat by a slender margin of around 2,800 votes. ( )

BJP sources said their Bihar leaders and grassroots workers were upset with Nitish’s swipes at Modi and decided to step back during the campaign, even if it meant a loss. “We hope better sense prevails on Nitish vis-à-vis Modi. We frankly don’t care if Nitish walks out on us,” a Bihar source said.

The decision to make Modi the campaign chief had floundered last week when BJP patriarch and mentor L.K. Advani let on that his support was iffy and, at best, conditional.

Advani made the point at a meeting in Madhya Pradesh where he derided Modi and extolled Madhya Pradesh chief minister Shivraj Singh Chauhan, insinuating that the leadership question was still open.

Advani proposed to Rajnath that instead of having a single over-arching campaign panel, Nitin Gadkari should be asked to preside over a second committee that should be specially constituted for the state elections in 2013.

The idea was fraught with ramifications for the BJP’s power equations.

Sources said a campaign committee chief normally exercises the veto on candidate selection and has the potential to emerge as a critical power centre. As the prime patron of ticket aspirants, the post ensures that in a post-poll tussle for the top post, the chairman would have the maximum number of endorsers. Hence, sources said, Advani was convinced Gadkari should be propped up as a Modi counter.

Several developments foiled Advani’s gameplan.

This morning, the BJP woke up to the news that it had wrested all the Gujarat seats from the Congress. The victory — which in normal circumstances might have not drawn anything more than smiles — morphed into a big celebration at the Delhi party headquarters, organised by general secretary and Modi confidant Amit Shah.

The loss of the Bihar’s Maharajganj and the forfeiture of deposit in an Uttar Pradesh Assembly constituency scarcely figured on the BJP’s radar, save for passing comments of how the Bihar rout ought to force a rethink by Nitish on his anti-Modi stance.

Given Modi’s predilection to magnify every electoral win as a national triumph, he quickly pronounced the results as a “fitting reply” to the Congress while Rajnath claimed it was a “huge achievement” for the BJP.

Advani finally smelt the coffee. After Gadkari refused to bite his bait and Chauhan downgraded himself in the pecking order of the BJP chief ministers after a stern nudge from Rajnath, even Sushma Swaraj, Advani’s favourite person, refused to confound the confusion.

It is understood that a message got around that the RSS wanted to end the churning and conveyed its displeasure to Advani through “appropriate channels”.

“It is early to say if Advani has been reined in. But the others don’t want to be drawn into the muck,” a source said.

This morning, sources said Advani furiously worked the phones to congratulate Modi. By then, the chief minister was in Delhi to attend a security meeting.

On hearing that Advani wanted to speak to him, Modi decided to call on the patriarch after visiting Rajnath.

The Rajnath call-on was replete with optics. Modi went with a box of sweets. They offered each other bites, hugged, flashed the victory sign and each said nice things about the other, prompting a BJP onlooker to remark that after the Atal-Advani duo, they were blessed with another “jodi” that will “bring in the much-needed sunshine into our party”.

The Gujarat chief minister spent 15 minutes of “quality time” with Advani, according to an aide who blamed the media for “creating stories of a rift” between them.

Modi wrapped up his visit with an interaction with the envoys of Latin American and Caribbean countries that included Mexico, Chile, Brazil, Venezuela, Colombia, Bolivia and Argentina to explore investment and business opportunities.