The Hindu : Hindutva will not be part of BJP poll agenda: Venkaiah Naidu

Online edition of India's National Newspaper
Saturday, May 31, 2003

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Hindutva will not be part of BJP poll agenda: Venkaiah Naidu

By Our Staff Reporter

HYDERABAD MAY 30. The Bharatiya Janata Party is proud of its Hindutva ideology but will not project it as its agenda for the elections to the five State Assemblies this year and the Lok Sabha next year.

This was the outcome of the party's two-day national meet of its State presidents and secretaries, which concluded here today.

While pledging to pursue Hindutva, the BJP committed itself to secularism as against "pseudo-secularism and appeasement". It also decided not to thrust the party's ideology on its alliance partners as it led a coalition Government at the Centre.

Summing up the deliberations at the end of the conclave convened to discuss "Mission-2004" of winning the Lok Sabha elections, the BJP president, M. Venkaiah Naidu, told newspersons that good governance and development were the main planks on which the party would go to polls. The BJP would project the Prime Minister, Atal Behari Vajpayee, as "vikas purush" (development man), the Deputy Prime Minister, L.K. Advani, as "loha purush" (iron man) and the BJP as the nation's first party and pro-poor, pro-farmer and pro-rural.

The State presidents were asked to highlight the enactment of POTA vis-à-vis the stand of other parties, controversy over the NCERT syllabus, scrapping of the Illegal Migrants Detention Act in the north-east, need for anti-conversion law, ban on cow slaughter and inter-linking of rivers.

Mr. Naidu released a 25-point action plan for the implementation of Mission-2004, which envisaged "jana sampark abhiyan", where party workers would reach every house and interact with people on Government programmes before the end of the year.

The plan also included a strategy to "corner" the Congress by comparing its 47 years of "misrule" with the "outstanding performance" of the BJP-led NDA Government in the past five years.

The meeting adopted a resolution not to allow the Congress and the Left parties to "divert the attention of the people from their failures".

In the 15 Congress-ruled States, the two communist-ruled States and in Bihar, where a party friendly to them ruled, the parties had always diverted the attention of the people from real issues.

The meeting decided that the theme to be presented before the people should focus on the fact that India had the potential to become a strong and developed nation but that the Congress rule had deprived it of that status.

The meeting gave a separate five-point programme for the five States going to the polls, which included preparation of a chargesheet about the omissions and commissions of the Congress Governments which were in power in four of the States.

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