Longtime ally breaks with India’s Bharatiya Janata party

India’s Bharatiya Janata party is facing a struggle to woo potential coalition partners for upcoming elections, after a long-time ally broke with it on Sunday over qualms about the Hindu nationalist opposition party’s putative prime ministerial candidate.

The Janata Dal (United) party, which has had a 17-year-old partnership with the BJP in the huge northern state of Bihar, said it was severing its ruling alliance in the state, citing concerns about “the way things have been moving in the BJP the past six to seven months”.

The decision by Nitish Kumar, the JD (U) leader, to end the alliance comes weeks after the BJP elevated Narendra Modi, the controversial chief minister of Gujarat, to be its de facto prime ministerial candidate, by appointing him to head its national election campaign.

It highlights the uphill battle the BJP will have in retaining existing allies – or wooing new ones – under the helm of Mr Modi, one of the most polarising figures in Indian politics, as it tries to form a coalition to defeat the incumbent Congress party in the parliamentary election due by 2014.

The tech-savvy chief minister is popular among business houses, and many young Indians, for his management of Gujarat’s fast-growing economy over the last decade. But to others he remains indelibly tainted by his role while chief minister during the 2002 Gujarat riots, during which hundreds of Muslim men, women and children were killed by Hindu mobs.

Human rights groups say Mr Modi bears responsibility for the brutal bloodletting, which they believe he and his allies either orchestrated, or did too little to stop.

Mr Modi has long denied responsibility for the killing, nor have any criminal charges ever been filed against him, though a close political ally, and former member of his cabinet, was convicted last year of murder and conspiracy for her role in instigating Hindu mobs to attack Muslims.

Even some of Mr Modi’s admirers admit he has much to answer for in connection with the riots – and his refusal to express regret for the killings during his tenure, which reinforced the impression that he condoned them.

“For a man who is articulate to the point of eloquence, his inability to explain why he seems not to regret the horrible violence that continues to blacken his image is inexplicable,” author and political commentator Tavleen Singh wrote in Sunday’s Indian Express newspaper.

In Bihar – where Muslim voters account for around 16.5 per cent of the population – Mr Kumar, the chief minister, felt that the association with a party now effectively under Mr Modi’s leadership would alienate his own domestic political base, which includes Muslims.

The BJP last ruled India from 1998 until 2004, as the leading player in a coalition of around a dozen other small parties, under the banner of the so-called National Democratic Alliance, under the leadership of Atal Behari Vajpayee, known as a conciliatory and moderate figure.

But Mr Modi’s ascent to the national stage has led to speculation that some of the BJP’s former allies – many secular-oriented, regional parties in states with strong Muslim constituencies – could break away from the BJP to form their own alliance, a so-called ‘third front”.

Mr Kumar, who has received plaudits for turning around Bihar – one of India’s poorest, and traditionally most misgoverned, states – is seen by many as a potential leader of a non-Congress, non-BJP led government after the parliamentary election.