New Delhi: The Bharatiya Janata Party has continued to lose its stalwarts to death. Over the past few months top front line leaders of the party including, Manohar Parrikar, Ananth Kumar, Sushma Swaraj and now Arun Jaitley, have passed away leaving a void in their absence.
In fact, Arun Jaitley and Sushma Swaraj were lost to the party within days of each other.
The party is seemingly in a shock with two stalwarts being lost in quick succession even as it sworn in to office just weeks ago. The BJP will be feeling a void at the loss of most of these leaders who were in their prime and still had a lot of years of public service left in them and which would be tough for the party to replenish.
Interestingly, in one of the first parliamentary party meeting after being re elected in the Lok Sabha polls in 2019, Prime Minister Narendra Modi had asked his fellow members to not forget about their own health, while caring for the society.
The words of the Prime Minister seemed to have taken shape after both Swaraj and Jaitley had decided not to actively participate in political life owing to their deteriorating status of their health. The two stalwarts had sought the Prime Minister’s special permission to be kept out of the union council of ministers.
The first term of Prime Minister Narendra Modi had also seen deaths of several top ministers. The party had earlier lost Ananth Kumar, a senior BJP leader from Karnataka, died last year and Manohar Parrikar, former defence minister, died suffering from cancer early this year.
While Union minister for environment Anil Madhav Dave died of cardiac arrest in 2017 and Gopinath Munde died in 2014 in a road accident in New Delhi.
