The Hindu : BJP to participate in RSS meet today

Online edition of India's National Newspaper
Wednesday, Jul 09, 2003

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National

BJP to participate in RSS meet today

By Our Special Correspondent

NEW DELHI JULY 8. The Bharatiya Janata Party president, M. Venkaiah Naidu, and general secretary, Sanjay Joshi, will participate in a meeting of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh's mass organisations in Chennai tomorrow.

This evening, Mr. Naidu met the Prime Minister, Atal Behari Vajpayee, and the Deputy Prime Minister, L.K. Advani, at Mr. Vajpayee's residence presumably to be briefed on the position the party will take at the meeting on issues such as legislation on Ayodhya and perhaps even the issue of sending troops to Iraq and the process of resolving the India-China boundary dispute keeping in mind the resolutions adopted by the RSS and the views of organisations such as the VHP.

Coordination between the various RSS wings with a mass base will be the main agenda of the meeting that will deliberate on issues in the light of the several resolutions adopted by the RSS at its Kanyakumari conference that ended on Sunday. A meeting like this routinely follows all major RSS meetings and this one is all the more important as elections are around the corner, a BJP leader said.

Leaders of the VHP, the Akhil Bharatiya Vidyarthi Parishad and the Bharatiya Mazdoor Sangh will also attend the meeting.

The BJP is especially keen on making peace with the VHP, which has been unhappy with the failed Ayodhya initiative mainly because it sought to keep the VHP out.

Senior party leaders have said that they were worried about the daily jibes from VHP leaders asking for the Prime Minister's resignation, a demand not even raised by the Opposition.

There is concern that if the VHP carries out its threat of ensuring the defeat of identified BJP leaders — Mr. Vajpayee is one of them — during next year's Lok Sabha polls, it could create problems for the party which has always banked on campaigning by the cadre of RSS organisations.

The impact of the failure of the Kanchi Sankaracharya, Sri Jayendra Saraswati's recent efforts to resolve the Ayodhya impasse is expected to figure at the meeting.

And, the BJP may also be asked to be more specific about its position on the Kashi and Mathura issues.

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