BJP president Nitin Gadkari (right) with party senior leader LK Advani during the party’s national executive meeting in New Delhi on Friday. (PTI)

New Delhi, Sept. 30: Narendra Modi’s “fasting”, the BJP’s “feasting”. The title of one of Anita Desai’s novels, Fasting, feasting, was unwittingly quoted by a Gujarat MP, who is also close to the chief minister, to explain his absence from the BJP’s national executive session that began here today. He nearly used it as a metaphor to explain the “disconnect” in the party.

“Let the big leaders in Delhi feast to their hearts’ content, eat, make merry. Modi-ji is living on water. He cannot and will not relate to what’s happening there,” he said.

Some in the gathering at the convention hall of the New Delhi Municipal Council’s central office fasted, others feasted.

Those who fasted didn’t just sip water like Modi purportedly did: they tucked into a special Navratra repast of pooris made of the flour of kuttu (buckwheat), vegetables cooked without masalas and kheer of puffed lotus seeds.

In absentia, Modi was spoken about more animatedly inside and outside the gathering than he might have been if he was present in flesh and blood. Rajya Sabha MP Balbir Punj, who is close to L.K. Advani, publicly stated that if given a chance, Modi would make one of the “best” PMs India has ever had.

Nobody put B.S. Yeddyurappa or Ramesh Pokhriyal “Nishank” in the same league. But the absence of the recently ousted chief ministers was also a talking point. The only saving grace, if that, was the fact that protocol-conscious Yeddyurappa informed BJP president Nitin Gadkari in advance that he would not show up. Taken together, the absence of Modi, Yeddyurappa and Pokhriyal had “deeper” implications for the BJP’s internal power dynamics than “our leaders care to think”, said a national executive member.

The most portentous of them was the feeling among the state leaders and office-bearers that critical policy and strategy decisions were still taken by a “Delhi cabal” that Gadkari was unable to rein in despite a clear mandate from the RSS. Some blamed the RSS for “loosening” its grip over the BJP because of its preoccupation with fighting the terror cases that implicated its activists. But a more important cause, a BJP source said, was that the Sangh was split over the extent of the control it should enforce over its political progeny.

“This is because individual RSS leaders have their favourites in the BJP and speak up for them in the chief’s presence. They also feel that only the BJP can help them with the terror cases. If the Sangh ends up playing politics, how can it expect its writ to run over the BJP?” a source asked. What particularly rankled with the regional chiefs was the fact that most of those who were of consequence in Delhi owed their political positions, tangentially and directly, to them. A Yeddyurappa-loyalist said: “Let’s take Arun Jaitley and Sushma Swaraj as examples. Their traditional political turfs supposedly are Delhi, Haryana and Punjab. The BJP has been out of power in Delhi for 15 years. We are insignificant in Haryana and in Punjab, we are the Akali’s junior partner.”