New Delhi, Nov. 12: Former RSS spokesperson M.G. Vaidya has alleged that Narendra Modi was “behind” a campaign to oust Nitin Gadkari as BJP president and had used the Jethmalanis, Ram and son Mahesh, as a sounding board.

Hours after Vaidya’s weekly blog titled Bhashya was out, his son Manmohan Vaidya was forced to retract his father’s charges.

Vaidya junior is the RSS’s chief propagandist and heads its publicity cell. Vaidya senior held a similar job in the nineties but lost it after his weekly columns in a Nagpur-based pro-RSS daily, Tarun Bharat, relentlessly attacked the BJP, especially Atal Bihari Vajpayee when he was Prime Minister. The paper stopped carrying his writings.

In his Sunday blog, Vaidya senior discounted the Gujarat chief minister’s prospects to lead the NDA in the next elections and said: “Modi might have felt that Gadkari as the BJP president will hamper his chances of becoming the Prime Minister. He is using Jethmalani to fulfil his plans.”

He alleged that Modi’s prime ministerial “aspirations” were stoked even more after Gadkari and L.K. Advani “opted out” of the “race”.

Vaidya junior, in a statement, said his father’s opinions did not constitute the Sangh’s “official view”. RSS spokesperson Varanasi Ram Madhav endorsed the statement. Stung by the suggestion that Vaidya senior’s blog again exposed the leadership fault-lines in the BJP and might have been an exercise in “undermining” Modi’s “stature” a month before Gujarat votes, Gadkari, too, joined the queue of statement-contributors.

Sources, however, said the BJP chief was told by an intermediary, working on Modi’s behalf, that the chief minister had “reasons to believe” that Vaidya senior’s blog might have been “prejudiced” by BJP and RSS leaders and it was in the interest of the party that Gadkari at least clarified his stand. Gadkari went out of his way to placate Modi and alluded to Vaidya senior as a “journalist” instead of as a “swayamsevak” which he continues to be despite not holding a post in the RSS. Gadkari said he rejected Vaidya senior’s “insinuation” and emphasised that “the BJP is firmly and unitedly behind Modi and we are confident that the party will win decisively in the Assembly elections.”

Vaidya junior fell out with Modi when he used to be Gujarat’s pranth pracharak (state propagandist). He was sent to Chennai and from there, he moved to Nagpur. He is now part of the Sangh’s top working executive committee.

The BJP said a “malicious campaign” was on to “malign Modi’s image” ahead of the polls.