12 June 2003

BJP ENTERS ASSEMBLY POLL ARENA WITH TWO FACES

From Jal Khambata

NEW DELHI: How will the Bhartiya Janata Party (BJP) revive and capitalise on issues like the Ayodhya Ram Mandir after Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee delivered the last word not to politicise it?

He wants all political parties to keep off the dispute but that applies as well to the BJP which was otherwise trying to bring the Ayodhya issue in focus in the upcoming November Assembly elections in five states, aided and abetted by the RSS and the Viswa Hindu Parishad.

Getting the needed signal from Deputy Prime Minister Lal Krishna Advani, whom BJP President M Venkaiah Naidu respects as his ideological Guru, a meeting of the party leaders convened by him on Thursday decided that the party should enter the poll arena with two faces.

Yet another important decision was to let the alliance and coalition be limited to the Lok Sabha elections and the BJP contest the upcoming elections on its own. The decision puts to rest the speculation that it will rope in the Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP) of Uttar Pradesh Chief Minister Mayawati with some seats to it in Rajasthan, Madhya Pradesh and Chhattigarh to sway the Dalit votes. It was decided to let the alliance with Mayawati remain limited to U.P. for the time being.

Ayodhya will not be an electoral issue but it will continue to be an ideological issue to let it be known to all that construction of a Ram Mandir at Ayodhya continues to remain dear and important to the BJP. While the electoral issues are limited to the election period, the ideological issues are for ever and that is the message the BJP is going to spread, circumventing the Prime Minister's advice that all parties should keep off Ayodhya.

So which party are you going to vote for? The BJP with its real face of ideology or the BJP with the mask of poll manifesto which may steer clear of issues like Ayodhya and Article 370 on abolition of special status of Jammu and Kashmir?

BJP General Secretary-cum-spokesman Mukhtar Abbas Naqvi finds nothing wrong in the party going to polls with two faces. Refusing to shut the BJP's voice on Ayodhya, he told reporters at the party headquarters here on Thurday: "Our ideological issues are not our elections issues, but we are not apologetic about them either."

The signal to the BJP leadership to keep the Ayodhya dispute in the hot spot notwithstanding the Prime Minister's diktat came from Advani by way of his assertion in Washington the previous day that "a court verdict (on Ayodhya dispute) will never be as acceptable to the parties involved as a negotiated settlement."

Added to this is a virtual directive from the RSS for enactment of a law to build the Ram Mandir in Ayodhya to respect what it described as a matter of faith that cannot be settled through a court verdict.

The signals from Advani and RSS signify the path the BJP has to take in the coming days and that is not the path the Prime Minister wanted. No need to sidestep Ayodhya just because Prime Minister says so. Both Advani and RSS spokesman Ram Madhav have virtually ruled out acceptance of the court verdict while prescribing what appears to be different remedies though they are really the same.

Either it is by law that the Muslims' claim of reconstruction of the demolished Babri Mosque is to be extinquisied or else they should be terrorised with spectre of what happened in Gujarat last year to yield to submission by way of what Advani calls a negotiated settlement.

Without putting the Ayodhya issue on its poll manifesto, the BJP would thus keep the debate on Ayodhya alive by letting its leaders keep talking about the only two possible solutions of the problem: negotiated settlement or a temple through an Act of Parliament. So Ayodhya is out of the BJP's poll agenda but the issue of ban on cow slaughter will be very much there.

Meanwhile, the meeting of the Central Election Committee convened by Naidu on Thursday put the party into the poll gear, announcing a 3-member team for each of the four main states of Madhya Pradesh, Rajasthan, Delhi and Chhattisgarh going to polls in November.

Balbir Punj, a financial journalist-turned Rajya Sabha member, was assigned the responsibility to prepare separate charge-sheets against each of the four Congress governments in these states. He is already busy collating the inputs received from the state party leaders.

Though its election teams for the November polls in Madhya Pradesh, Chhatisgarh, Rajasthan and Delhi are already in place for the past few months, Naqvi chose to re-announce the names to indicate that they will now swing into action.

Every state has a Central Office-bearer, a Union Minister incharge and a campaign incharge. Here are names of the teams that will be doing all that the party requires to win the elections:

RAJASTHAN: General Secretary Pramod Mahajan, Information and broadcasting Minister Ravi Shankar Prasad and Dina Nath Mishra, a Hindi journalist turned Rajya Sabha member.

MADHYA PRADESH: General Secretary Sanjay Joshi, Union Law Minister Arun Jaitley and Amitabh Sinha.

CHHATTISGARH: Vice-President and former Jharkhand Chief Minister Babulal Marandi, Union Agriculture Minister Rajnath Singh and Prabhat Jha.

DELHI: General Secretary Mukhtar Abbas Naqvi, Urban Development Minister Annath Kumar and Siddharth Nath Singh.

Added responsibility to Naqvi is not only to be the voice of the party as the spokesman but also look after the tour and coordination of the elections. The first task to which he settled down himself after briefing the Media was to chalk out the tour programme of Vajpayee and Advani in the poll-bound states. The party wants them to tour the states in three rounds.

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