Is BJP's 'confusion' over Delhi CM candidate a strategic move?

Is the BJP struggling to find an answer for its leadership problem in Delhi which is due to go to election in a few months?

Or why should Union HRD Minister Smriti Irani's name surface as the BJP's possible chief ministerial candidate in Delhi after a series of names made the rounds?

Or is the surfacing of names like Kiran Bedi and Smriti Irani besides the regular ones like Harsh Vardhan, Vijay Goel, Vijendra Gupta, Satish Upadhyay and others a part of the ploy to keep Arvind Kejriwal, the party's biggest opponent in the upcoming election, at bay?

It could be both. The BJP had served in power in Delhi in the past but it still has a leadership vacuum at the top for none of three leaders who served as the state's chief minister are around today. While Sushma Swaraj is a Union minister now and is not much in the headlines once the Narendra Modi era set in, Sahib Singh Verma has passed away and nobody much remembers Madan Lal Khurana, who was expelled twice from the BJP.

In this situation, the BJP in Delhi needs a new leadership which can rein in ambitions of a number of leaders jostling with each other. Floating of Union minister Irani's name could be a way to silence all at the same time and stop the rift from coming to the open.

But a far bigger concern is Arvind Kejriwal. After his meteoric rise and fall, the Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) chief is taking this election as a reality check and the BJP will feel the heat by his presence, albeit with a battered image.

The BJP seems to be playing around with names to quell the rift & confuse AAP

The recent sting operation on the Delhi BJP exposing its horse-trading exercise had upset the saffron party, which is also feeling the challenge to regain its bastions it had lost to the AAP last year.

The mixing up of names could be a ploy to confuse the AAP and Kejriwal so that they fail to come up with a definite plan for the opponent. It might have taken a lesson from its experience last year when Vardhan was announced the chief ministerial candidate and it led to widening of rifts in the party.