The Hindu : `Hindutva dilution not the reason for BJP's poll reverses'

Online edition of India's National Newspaper
Wednesday, Apr 03, 2002

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National

`Hindutva dilution not the reason for BJP's poll reverses'

By Our Special Correspondent

NEW DELHI APRIL 2. ``I will not stand in the way of anyone who wants to occupy this chair,'' the BJP president, Jana Krishnamurthi, said today in response to questions whether there was a move to make a ``change'' at the top position of the party. Certainly he did not agree with those who thought that the BJP was losing popularity because it had ``moved away'' from Hindutva.

If dilution of Hindutva was the reason for the recent electoral reverses, how did the party win in the 1999 Lok Sabha election when it had publicly declared that it would be bound by the national agenda for governance? ``That is not the issue, our workers understand this well,'' Mr. Krishnamurthi asserted. Nor did he think that certain provisions in the Union Budget which had hit the middle classes were responsible for the BJP's poor showing. It was for the party's national executive to consider, but the BJP cannot hold the Finance Minister, Yashwant Sinha, responsible for the party's current problems.

Mr. Krishnamurthi told reporters that ``those who are in the Union Cabinet have the task of making the Government strong, and those in the party organisation have to make the party strong,'' once again virtually ruling out any Kamaraj type of plan in the party. ``We need and do have talent both in the Government and the party,'' but if any Minister wanted to work for the party he was prepared to find work for him.

He was planning to make improvements in the party and was in the process of consulting party colleagues, and the overhaul of the party organisation would not be restricted to the States which had recently gone to the polls and where the BJP had been defeated. He would come up with some kind of plan that would give the ``Midas touch'' to the party, converting defeat into success and victory. All political parties had their ups and downs, defeats and victories, and nobody need write the BJP off, after all, after 1984 when the BJP won only two Lok Sabha seats, the Congress thought the BJP chapter was closed. But in less than five years the party bounced back.

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