The Hindu : BJP for early polls in Gujarat

Online edition of India's National Newspaper
Saturday, Mar 16, 2002

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National

BJP for early polls in Gujarat
By Our Special Correspondent

NEW DELHI, MARCH 15. The Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) has more or less made up its mind to go for early elections in Gujarat, but is awaiting a green signal from the Prime Minister, Atal Behari Vajpayee. This is expected to come after the former Gujarat Chief Minister, Keshubhai Patel, is inducted into the Cabinet on entering the Rajya Sabha.

Highly placed sources today indicated that the Union Home Minister, L.K. Advani, whose political home State is Gujarat, has already let it be known that he favours early elections. The view in the party is that the communal polarisation in the State after the Godhra violence and the carnage that followed would certainly help the BJP regain the ground it had lost to the Congress.

The calculation is that the induction of Mr. Patel into the Cabinet would kill two birds with one stone _ it would help assuage the hurt feelings of the Patel community in Gujarat after Mr. Patel was asked to step down in favour of Narendra Modi, and it will help remove from the State the man who continues to be a rallying point for the anti-Modi faction. Finally, early elections after the Chief Minister, Mr. Narendra Modi, offers to resign and recommends dissolution of the Assembly could help the party regain some moral ground while taking away the sting of the Opposition demand for the sacking of the Chief Minister.

Quite unabashedly senior party leaders in and out of Government have been claiming that the riots in Gujarat have helped polarise the polity in favour of the BJP, seen as the `pro-Hindu party', although some believe that the business and commercial loss to the State will far outweigh the communal issues and the party may still be in for an unpleasant electoral surprise.

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