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Modi, the big draw

By Our Special Correspondent

NEW DELHI DEC. 5. More and more it is being conceded by the Bharatiya Janata Party that it is a "Modi election'' in Gujarat, so much so that the election tours planned for other leaders have been cut and pruned as there is "no demand''. The Deputy Prime Minister, L. K. Advani, who has so far failed to draw respectable crowds, was to have touched each of the roughly 25 districts in the State at least once. His election tour programme has now been redrawn and restricted to about a dozen meetings, one for every two districts.

The time for the meetings of the Prime Minister, Atal Behari Vajpayee, on December 7 and 9 has been changed in favour of evenings, except for one at Surat, in the hope of attracting larger crowds.

And election tours of several leaders have been cancelled altogether. The senior Cabinet Minister, Murli Manohar Joshi, who recently returned here after election meetings in South Gujarat, was to have gone again to the State today and tomorrow, but the programme has now been cancelled. The Parliamentary Affairs Minister, Pramod Mahajan, has preferred to keep an engagement in Rajasthan on December 8 rather than address meetings in Gujarat, and as for the tribal leader, Dilip Singh Bhuria, and the Dalit MP, Sangh Priya Gautam, the State unit had apparently sent word to say: no thank you, they are not needed. The meetings of almost 11 or 12 party leaders, including the Ministers of State, Rajiv Pratap Rudy and Ravi Shankar Prasad, have been cancelled for the next two days.

Contrary to the big claims of a two-thirds majority victory in Gujarat made by the BJP leaders, there is worry as many party leaders, including Mr. Advani, Sushma Swaraj and Uma Bharati had failed to draw big crowds. The one leader who is attracting large audiences at his public meetings is the Chief Minister, Narendra Modi.

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