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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