NEW DELHI: Focusing on the Congress-led UPA government’s failures, the BJP national executive meeting in Bangalore from Friday will also seek to sell a thesis on how and why the Congress is on the decline and the BJP on an upswing.
The thesis, likely to be incorporated in the party’s political resolution to be adopted at the meet, a senior leader said, is intended to boost party morale and erode the Congress leadership’s status.
This is based on a formulation by BJP general secretary Arun Jaitley, who contends that the Congress under Sonia Gandhi and Manmohan Singh has lost touch with the grassroots.
These leaders are out of touch with the thinking of their own rank and file and, as a result, the Congress has been taking positions that Congressmen themselves do not agree with, Jaitley says.
He says some of the decisions taken by the present regime were based not on political inputs or thinking of Congressmen but short-term political exigencies or wrong considerations.
As a result, there was the spectacle of the government withdrawing decisions or reversing stands on issues such as Ram Setu and the Amarnath land row.
Jaitley cites instances such as the Congress being pushed by the DMK into saying that Ram Setu be demolished, by PDP and others into retracting the order on land to the Shri Amarnath Shrine Board, and then there are UPA ministers supporting citizenship for Bangladeshi infiltrators and several of them backing Simi.
He draws a comparison with earlier Congress leaders when the BJP was trying to find political space for itself. “When we used to take an aggressive nationalist stance on any issue, the Congress responded with a moderate, centrist position till the time of Rajiv Gandhi, with the exception of the Shah Bano case,” Jaitley argues.
Seeking to contrast the present government’s approach with earlier party regimes, he says, “No one could accuse Indira Gandhi of being soft on terror. She overtook us in taking a nationalist stance on dealing with Bangladesh, Punjab terrorism, etc.”
That was the kind of approach Congress workers could understand and relate to. Now, they are at a loss due to the confused response of the leadership and even opposed to the party’s stated official stand. The political space thus vacated leaves the BJP as the prime alternative for the people, Jaitley believes.
s_rajesh@dnaindia.net
